Meditations on Mazzy Star: Growing Up with So Tonight That I Might See

Mazzy Star has always been a bit of an anachronism. Out of step with the driving, angry sound of their ‘90s rock contemporaries, their music is mellow and impressionistic, owing far more to the mid-‘80s tides of shoegaze and neo-psychedelia than the rise of grunge. This lends the work both a nostalgic quality and a timeless one; most of their songs sound like they should be playing on a car radio somewhere in the middle of the night, parked under a streetlight or driving in circles.

It could be that this unique sound comes from the band’s backstory, since Mazzy Star is the result of several other bands reinventing themselves. Guitarist David Roback formed Rain Parade with his brother Steven and his college roommate Matt Piucci in 1981, in the blooming garden of the West Coast Paisley Underground rock scene. In 1983, he left to join Rainy Day with Kendra Smith of the Dream Syndicate, with whom he formed the band Clay Allison in 1984. By 1987, they had changed their name to Opal after a Syd Barrett song. That same year, while on tour for the album Happy Nightmare Baby, Smith left the band suddenly. Vocalist Hope Sandoval, then shortly out of high school and opening for Sonic Youth and the Minutemen in the folk duo Going Home, stepped in as her replacement.

Mazzy Star first emerged from Opal’s chrysalis with the 1990 release She Hangs Brightly, a great album that leads with the enduring classic “Halah” and a Slapp Happy homage in “Blue Flower.” The record gained them some attention from the press (as well as from Kurt Cobain), and it introduced the world to their sound—but the ghosts of their previous projects still lingered. “Give You My Lovin’” dates back to Sandoval’s time in Going Home, and “Ghost Highway” was originally slated by Smith and Roback to be the title track of Opal’s second album. With the release of So Tonight That I Might See, which celebrates its 30th anniversary today, Mazzy Star found their own stride. Their sound became a little more experimental and far more in sync; their lyrics lost a straightforward edge in an effort to lean heavily into their trademark dreamy metaphors. The album itself was—and still is—a narrative of becoming.

20 years and a coast away from its initial release, I discovered So Tonight That I Might See while wading through adolescence in suburban Virginia, in a lonely pursuit of any music that could tell me who I was. In fact, in one of my dorkier moments, I remember looking up the term “mazzy star tshirt” immediately after I listened to the album for the first time, so I could tell the world that I’d decided to claim membership in the band’s fandom. (I didn’t end up buying one.) At the time, I was achingly awkward, channeling most of my anxiety into oblique references and questionable haircuts. Not quite a girl and not yet anything else, Mazzy Star spoke to me at a moment when little else did.

Born from the mind-meld of Roback and Sandoval, the lyrics of So Tonight That I Might See speak not only of solitude and emotion, but of the desperate bid to connect that accompanies them—through love, through music, and yes, through dreams. “Fade Into You” paints a crush as an intrinsic state of being, a change in state that should be obvious to anyone who encounters you. This is an implicit fantasy of insecurity, but it’s also a wish to communicate without speaking: to wear your desire on your skin and “hold the hand inside” of another. “Blue Light,” meanwhile, projects outward. Like the Halloween party sequence in Donnie Darko (which I was shown—how else?—by a high school boyfriend), it depicts a glowing soul inside of a struggling loved one, a magic light that signals your best friend’s pain and a tossing and turning world beyond your hometown. “I wanna see it shine,” Sandoval coaxes, urging all the while to feel and share it all.

I listened to her sing that line more times than I could count in high school, picturing my best friends’ rooms and the light emanating from my own. There’s a profound empathy to it, a recognition of another that’s so clear-eyed and confident in a way I couldn’t imagine being at the time. It’s a confidence that’s echoed in “Unreflected,” where Sandoval warns against the mimicry that can lead to “a shortened, flattened soul”—“follow anybody, is that what you do?” Despite the anxiety that infamously wracked their live performances, Mazzy Star’s language is of sixth senses and intuition, of deep assuredness from within. Amid the turmoil that the album reckons with, the ultimate desire of So Tonight That I Might See is self-connection.

Lately much has been made of girlhood and the music that honors it, but Mazzy Star came long before our contemporary sanctification. There are no small problems on So Tonight That I Might See; instead, all are held with reverence and care. On “Mary in Silence,” the enigmatic central figure dances out of reach, devotionally-tinged and suggestively homoerotic. By “Into Dust,” desire turns to decay as a full-spun reckoning with mortality plays out over Roback’s cascading guitar. Youthful preoccupations are considered directly alongside these revelations of death and religion, but the pairings aren’t an attempt to assert that everyday daydreams are just as valid, or even that they need to be compared at all. Rather, they’re a serene acknowledgement that all are necessary threads in the making and revealing of a self.

Sandoval weaves these threads with dexterity on So Tonight That I Might See, while Roback’s instrumentation provides the loom. He draws upon the bluesy progressions of his earlier projects, but more confidently and playfully than on She Hangs Brightly, letting fuzz and atmosphere reign. On “She’s My Baby,” acoustics and electric guitars dance, paying homage to the band’s psychedelic roots while pushing into new territory. But Roback also knows when to scale back. So Tonight’s version of “Five String Serenade” by Arthur Lee of Love is a stripped-down take on the original, leading with a single plucked guitar in lieu of humming strings. Not only does this prevent the cover from buckling under the weight of the original, it allows Sandoval’s voice to take center stage, presenting the track as an intimate offering instead of a grand gesture. In my earliest listens to “Five String Serenade,” I felt its arpeggios giving voice to an achingly-teenage feeling: being overcome by just how much love you can give, and terrified by the desire to give it.

It’s interesting to consider So Tonight That I Might See in this coming-of-age light, knowing what eventually became of Mazzy Star on the heels of its success. The band had initially signed with Rough Trade, which folded abruptly in the same year as She Hangs Brightly’s release. Within weeks, they caught the attention of Capitol in the midst of the early-90s major label alt rock craze. So Tonight That I Might See came along in the fall of 1993, and its success unfurled over time, with “Fade Into You” emerging as a mainstream sleeper hit on the Billboard charts a year later and the whole album going platinum in 1995. Suddenly caught in the marketing machine, Mazzy Star felt suffocated. As Sandoval would later recount for the San Francisco Chronicle, “they had a formula. And suddenly all these people wanted to come to the studio to keep track of what we were doing and make sure we were following that formula. So we got out.” What could be more in the spirit of self-definition?

So Tonight That I Might See has had an enduring legacy since its release 30 years ago. “Fade Into You” has been used as a needle drop alone countless times, with a recent self-referential twist on the latest season of Yellowjackets. But the record’s imprint is also clear on the pop charts. It influenced the downtempo dreaming of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey and the confessional ballads of SZA’s latest offering SOS. In the indie sphere, the record is a direct ancestor of the Tumblr-renowned Cigarettes After Sex; Sandoval’s drowsy alto echoes in Angel Olsen’s drawl; Hannah Jadagu’s guitar evokes Roback’s on her captivating 2023 debut Aperture.

For my own part, it’s an album that’s followed me around my entire life. I’ve listened to So Tonight That I Might See in the midst of blooming crushes and horrific breakups. It’s soundtracked my soul-searching and the still-novel dream of a future for myself and my friends. Even now, when I revisit it, I discover something new—a riff that surprises me; a turn of phrase that upends how I’ve previously seen a song. Lately, I’ve been drawn to the title track, a seven-minute evocation of The Doors and “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Over droning guitars and a spiral of feedback, Sandoval performs an incantation, uplifting her intent through imagistic contradictions that spill forth like lyrical koans: “Let me hold you tight like rain. Sunshine on a rainy day.” This is the central contradiction of shadow work, the fallacy of communication itself. To achieve clarity, you have to first wade deep into mystery, then let it speak.

Annie Parnell is a writer, radio host and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Literary Review, Pop Matters, The Boot and elsewhere. Annie can be found online @avparnell and avparnell.com.