Janice Headley dives into She Hangs Brightly by Mazzy Star, as part of KEXP's monthlong Aquí y Ahora programming.
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Janice Headley dives into She Hangs Brightly by Mazzy Star. Born from California's Paisley Underground scene, the group is distinguished by the languid vocal style of Hope Sandoval, a Mexican-American songwriter who came into the spotlight in the 1990s. This episode is part of KEXP's monthlong Aquí y Ahora programming for Latinx Heritage Month, officially celebrated from September 15 to October 15 in the United States.
Hosts: Dusty Henry and Martin Douglas
Written + Produced: Janice Headley
Mixed + Mastered: Roddy Nikpour
Podcast Manager: Isabel Khalili
Editorial Director: Larry Mizell Jr.
Support the podcast: kexp.org/cobain
Of all the 50 favorite albums scribbled in Kurt Cobain’s journals, Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut LP She Hangs Brightly might seem like a surprising inclusion.
The California-based group — led by songwriters Hope Sandoval and David Roback — are best known for their 1994 hit single “Fade Into You,” their biggest mainstream hit, hitting number three on the US Billboard Modern Rock charts and peaking at #44 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also incredibly overused in TV and film, soundtracking scenes in Starship Troopers, CSI:NY, Desperate Housewives, and Gilmore Girls, just to name a very, very few:
But the album we’re focusing on today pre-dates all of that…
In the early ‘80s, the Los Angeles music scene began tapping into their roots for inspiration, combining the psychedelic guitars of the past with the present-day energy of punk. The genre was termed the “Paisley Underground” and included bands like The Dream Syndicate,
Green on Red,
and Rain Parade…
a band led by vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter David Roback.
David and his brother Steven had previously been in a band called The Unconscious with their across-the-street neighbor Susanna Hoffs, who later went on to form The Bangles.
While the Unconscious never released any music, Susanna and David reunited in the Paisley Underground supergroup Rainy Day, which featured members of their respective bands, as well as The Dream Syndicate, Salvation Army, and the Three O'Clock. Here’s Susanna on the Record Store Day podcast in 2020:
SUSANNA: I think the idea of the band as an art project was sort of how I approached it. And that's why it was so amazing that David and I had this birth of our own first, you know, kind of group there, which never really made an album, but we ended up influencing each other's bands as we went on. And the Rainy Day record was kind of the recording that most expressed what our our early moments in Berkeley collaborating sounded like.
You can already hear echoes of what would become Mazzy Star begin to shape with Rainy Day’s slower-paced approach to Bob Dylan’s 1964 single “I’ll Keep it With Mine.”
As for Rain Parade, the band truly helped to solidify the sound of the “Paisley Underground” with their 1983 debut album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, which famed rock critic Jim DeRogatis called “not only the best album from any of the Paisley Underground bands, it ranks with the best psychedelic rock efforts from any era.”
In a 2015 interview with Uncut Magazine, Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate added, “The Rain Parade were as Paisley as the Paisley Underground got. Of all the bands on the scene – the Dream Syndicate, the Salvation Army, Green On Red, even the Bangs who became the Bangles – all of us were coming from a more punk rock background. But the Rain Parade weren’t like that. They were happy just to be floating and gentle and trippy. Pink Floyd and the Byrds. Who didn’t love that?”
One of the many fans of Rain Parade was a 15-year-old named Hope Sandoval. As she told Newsweek in 2013, "The most amazing live shows that I've ever seen were Rain Parade shows."
Hope grew up in East L.A., in the Maravilla neighborhood, raised by Mexican-American parents. She had one sibling and seven half-siblings, which allowed her to… get away with things kids in smaller families might not have been able to.
As Hope told The Telegraph in 2001, "It's just like anybody else - some people, most people don't wanna go to school. They just don't want to. It's. . . not fun. I was just somebody who got away with it. There wasn't really anyone watching."
She began skipping class and staying out late to see bands. She was 13 when she fell in love with The Rolling Stones.
One song in particular caught her ear – the 1966 song “Goin’ Home” which closed out the US edition of their fourth LP, Aftermath.
Hope and her best friend Sylvia Gomez took the song title as the name for their band, Going Home — a simple acoustic folk duo with Sylvia on guitar and Hope on vocals.
Despite their folkier sound, they landed opening slots for Sonic Youth and The Minutemen. As Hope told Newsweek, "It was intimidating, everybody sat down. It's surprising, but they really liked it."
Sylvia gave David a cassette copy of their home-recorded demo after a Rain Parade show in 1983, and David was immediately drawn to Hope’s unique languid vocal style.
Originally, the following demo that was recorded and produced by David was only given to people the band knew. Nowadays, you can find ripped copies on YouTube. The album was never officially released.
But through this project, David and Hope found a musical soulmate in the other. Both musicians were introverted, with a deep passion for music. Here’s David and Hope on Australia’s Radio J in a 2018 interview:
DAVID: We went into a recording studio, Hope and her partner Sylvia Gomez. They had a band called Going Home, and I thought they were so amazing. And so we went into a studio in Venice, California, and a place called Radio Tokyo, and we recorded all sorts of interesting — they performed, and I was producing. But it was amazing and it was very inspiring. And that eventually led to us working together.
HOPE: I mean, we don't even really need to speak to each other. You know, we use telepathy. We just know what each other's thinking.
DAVID: We don't really have a process that needs to be verbalized between the two of us. We just really basically do what we like, and that's been the way it's always been and what turns us on and what we feel emotionally connected to. That's what we like to do.
After the release of Rain Parade’s debut album, David left the band and formed the duo Opal with Kendra Smith, the former bassist for the Dream Syndicate. When Kendra left Opal in the middle of a European tour supporting the Jesus & Mary Chain, David asked Hope to come finish the tour in her place.
David’s contract with Rough Trade Records included an album from Opal, but Hope felt unsatisfied recording songs that had been written by Kendra and David. She suggested they start anew, and thus Mazzy Star was formed.
They quickly composed and recorded seven new tracks in Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco that would comprise their debut album, She Hangs Brightly.
One of the included tracks was a Going Home original titled “Give You My Lovin’.”
And here’s the Mazzy Star version:
In 1988, Nirvana covered the song “Love Buzz,” originally recorded by Dutch rock band Shocking Blue in 1969.
On She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Star also turned out a cover from an obscure European band called Slapp Happy, covering their song “Blue Flower.”
She Hangs Brightly also includes a cover of the blues song "I'm Sailin',” originally recorded in 1971 by Memphis Minnie.
Nirvana also covered a blues classic on their MTV Unplugged performance, giving their take on Lead Belly’s 1944 version of the standard “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”
She Hangs Brightly includes one song that pre-dates Mazzy Star, a leftover from David’s writing sessions with Kendra for Opal… the very Doors-inspired “Ghost Highway.”
And a song that’s sort-of a proto “Fade Into You” – the single “Be My Angel.”
It’s not known for certain, but it’s hinted that Kurt discovered the band when Australian tour promoter Stephen Pavlovic sent him the vinyl for She Hangs Brightly as a gift. He mentions the present in the liner notes of the 1992 Nirvana compilation album Incesticide, alongside other things he found “rewarding” including receiving the Raincoats debut album from the band members themselves, touring with Shonen Knife, and having the Vaselines reunite just to open for Nirvana on their Scottish tour dates – all things previously mentioned here on The Cobain 50 podcast.
And fun fact for KEXP listeners – Stephen Pavlovic went on to form Modular Recordings, the indie record label that brought us music from Cut Copy, The Avalanches, and Tame Impala.
Kurt’s love of Mazzy Star led him to the director Kevin Kerslake, who ended up working on four music videos for Nirvana. On his website, Kevin shared "Kurt once said to me, ‘You made my favorite video of all time – Halah by Mazzy Star,’ and I was like, ‘Cool, I love that video too.’ He then asked me to make Nirvana’s next video, which I agreed to do, and that was 'Come as You Are.’"
"The band was on every newsstand in the country by this point, and Kurt was really sick of that fact, so he said the only thing he wanted was to not be in the video. I obviously knew that was sort of a hurdle, especially since this was still the introductory phase of the band, so I tried to create some motifs that allowed them to be in the video without really being in it. I tried to figure out all sorts of ways to obscure their identity, knowing that their record label was going to want to put the faces of the band in the video – they were the tube of toothpaste, and you have to see the toothpaste in the ad. So the whole video was this dance of how we could obscure them but see them at the same time.”
Kurt’s connection to Mazzy Star continued, when in 1993 David and Hope added musician Jill Emery to their line-up, a former bass player for Hole. She told Uncut Magazine, “I went to their rehearsal studio. Everyone was so reserved. It was quite a shock, coming from Hole, with an aggressive Courtney Love. Strangely, their quietness matched Hole’s abrasiveness, just on a different level.” Jill stayed in the band through 1996.
She Hangs Brightly proved a stunning introduction to the beauty Mazzy Star could create. Not only did it land on Kurt’s 50 Favorite Albums list, but Pitchfork later ranked the album at number 29 on its list of the 30 Best Dream Pop Albums.
Their 1993 follow-up album So Tonight That I Might See landed at #2. David and Hope never expected the album’s first single “Fade Into You” to blow up the way it did, and the LP ended up going platinum here in the States. Naturally, the pressure was on for the next album, 1996’s Among My Swan. Hope literally begged their label, Capitol Records, to be released from their contract, and the went on hiatus the following year.
In the years that followed, Hope made several guest vocal appearances on albums from the Chemical Brothers, Air, Death in Vegas, and funnily enough, the Jesus and Mary Chain – who she and David opened for when he asked her to sing in Opal back in 1987.
Hope started the band Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions in 2000 with musician Colm Ó Cíosóig, best known as the drummer for My Bloody Valentine.
David moved to Norway and began working with local musicians there. He composed experimental music for films and installations. Meanwhile, he and Hope continued to write songs together, and in 2013, they released their fourth full-length album titled Seasons of Your Day.
Sadly, David Roback died from cancer in 2020 at the age of 61.
There are currently no public plans to release the music he and Hope had been working on previous to his passing. In a 2020 interview with Uncut Magazine, his old bandmate Susanna Hoffs mentions that plans to release their early cassette recordings as The Unconscious or make the Rainy Day project album available on streaming platforms were also put aside. Variety Magazine reported that David and Kendra had been finalizing reissues of Opal’s two albums and a compilation of early recordings, but unfortunately the reissues have since been withdrawn.
Hope commented to Uncut that unreleased songs may eventually surface, commenting, “Once our families inherit everything after we’re dead and gone, I’m sure people will hear everything.”
On Facebook, Hope shared this poem shortly after David’s death. I’ll do my best to read it:
What will we do now?
Now that you leave me here
Even though the dark blue sky is still radiant
and filled with the comforting sadness that holds us together.
What will we do now?
As you’ve been embraced away
Did I stay behind and not notice?
Did you leave a quiet message somewhere
And I forgot to hear it.
Good night my beautiful friend
Please come back when the hour is sound.
