Interviews 2013+
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 2:08 pmHere are the first interviews given by Hope Sandoval and David Roback for the release of Seasons of your day:
Rolling Stone
Mazzy Star's 17-Year Silence: 'Music Is Its Own Language'
'We never stopped writing or recording. We just stopped performing and releasing things'
By Steve Baltin | August 20, 2013
Caption - Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star - Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
When Mazzy Star last released an album, 1996's Among My Swan, Bill Clinton was still president. Seventeen years later, the duo of David Roback and Hope Sandoval are set to return with the forthcoming Seasons of Your Day.
Roback tells Rolling Stone the impetus for finally releasing new music was simple: an upcoming tour that will kick off in November. "We just decided to release a collection of songs," he says. "We're going to be doing more concerts in the future, so we thought it would be exciting to perform some of our unreleased newer songs."
Mazzy Star was widely believed to be on hiatus for some time, but Roback and Sandoval say they have continued to make music all these years. "We're always recording music, writing songs," Sandoval says.
"We never stopped writing or recording. We just stopped performing and releasing things," Roback adds.
The prospect of a wealth of hidden Mazzy Star tracks will make the duo's many diehard fans salivate. While Roback isn't sure what will happen with all the material, there is hope people will hear the songs. "Some of them may appear in our live concerts, some of them we may release later," he says.
However, the music they've been making all these years is primarily for themselves. "When I'm working on music with Hope, the person that's foremost in my thoughts is Hope," says Roback. "We tend to get quite caught up in just the making of music for ourselves."
Roback does admit he's curious to see how the band will be greeted after such a long absence. "We've met a lot of interesting people who like our music, and it's always been kind of interesting to us to take our music out of our private world and share it with other people," he says. "It's an interesting thing, if not necessarily always our priority."
He's looking forward to bringing the new music from Seasons of Your Day to the stage. "This new album has a lot of different combinations of instruments, acoustic and electric in different combinations we haven't used so much before. It's kind of a subtle thing we're more aware of, but it's interesting for us to perform this music live now," he says. "There's a lot of subtlety in the music, and to actually put that across live, when it happens, it's really exciting."
For Sandoval, the thought of reintroducing some of their back catalog is just as gratifying. "I personally am excited about playing a lot of the old songs," she says. "I do think they'll fit in with the new music, because it's the same people that are playing the music."
Mazzy Star are known for doing very few interviews, but we found them very entertaining and gracious in their own way. Discussing film, whether it's Antonioni's seminal Blow Up or the more recent An Education, the duo open up. "We have a sort of Chauncey Gardner approach to music," jokes Roback, referring to the famed Peter Sellers character in Being There.
"It's hard to translate musical ideas into words," he says. "I think the music is its own language."
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Stereogum
Q&A: Mazzy Star Talk (A Little) About Seasons Of Your Day, Their First New Album In 17 Years
September 11th 2013
by T. Cole Rachel @ 12:30pm
Mazzy Star 2013
Mazzy Star is one of those rare bands whose very name has come to define a certain aesthetic. Many of us who make a living writing and talking about music are all probably guilty at some point of describing a new record as having a very “Mazzy Star” kind of vibe — i.e. anything pretty and dreamy and druggy and gorgeously slow. If anything, it’s a compliment to the band that they have managed, over the course of 23 years, to carve out their own private and very woozy niche. Mazzy Star makes music that brings to mind hints of the folky Paisley Underground, soporific blues riffs, reverbed guitar lines that go one for days, and a voice — courtesy of Hope Sandoval — with the same sonic quality as opium smoke, rising and weaving through songs that always sound best when played in the middle of the night (or, for those of us of a certain age, perhaps during a college makeout session). It’s been 17 years since the duo last released an album (1996′s Among My Swan), but this month they will break their long silence with the release of Seasons of Your Day, an album that pretty much sounds exactly like Mazzy Star (in the most beautiful way possible). I contacted Sandoval and bandmate David Roback via the world’s most complicated Skype scenario: Hope in Ireland, David in Norway, and myself in Brooklyn. Not surprisingly, given their reclusive nature and the famously reserved quality of their music, the two musicians might just be the unchattiest people I’ve ever tried to talk to. I don’t mind, though. Mazzy Star’s music has seen me (and a lot of people) through some dark and confusing (and also wonderful) times … and even if they aren’t all that psyched about explaining themselves, I’m just happy that they are back.
STEREOGUM: Thanks to both of you for taking a moment to chat with me. It’s been nearly seventeen years since you last released an album. Why the long gap between records?
ROBACK: We’ve been writing and recording music all along, we just haven’t released anything up until now. But we’ve been working on and off all along, so it really doesn’t feel like a break for us.
STEREOGUM: So what made now feel like the right time to release a record?
ROBACK: I’m not even sure that right now is a good time to release a record. I’m not sure there is a good time to do it.
STEREOGUM: The announcement of a new album after so many years away has caused a lot of excitement among your fans. Have you been surprised by the reaction?
SANDOVAL: We don’t really know. It’s hard for us to tell.
ROBACK: We haven’t been playing any shows recently, so I don’t know … but we’ll be starting to play shows again next month, beginning on Halloween.
STEREOGUM: The two of you have been making music together for nearly two decades now. Has your way of working changed much over the years?
SANDOVAL: No.
STEREOGUM: You’ve both made lots of interesting music outside of Mazzy Star, but there seems to be something particularly special that happens when you write songs together. What is it about the dynamic between the two of you that makes for such amazing songs?
ROBACK: Well, we like to play live — at least when we’re working alone — and when we record it’s like we’re playing our songs live in the studio. We like for everything to have a very live kind of feel and the songs kind of mirror that live experience. That’s something that we’ve both always been very into, both me and Hope.
STEREOGUM: I know that a lot of this record was recorded in either California or Norway. David, do you live in Norway?
ROBACK: I actually spend most of my time in London these days. We recorded there as well.
SANDOVAL: I live in California.
STEREOGUM: I’ve always read that touring and playing live was kind of nerve-wracking for you guys. Hope, has that aspect of the band changed for you over the years? Do you find that performing in front of people has gotten easier?
SANDOVAL: No, it hasn’t changed.
STEREOGUM: How do you deal with it?
SANDOVAL: I haven’t really figured it out, to be honest. I just make myself go out there, and hope for the best.
STEREOGUM: The record comes with a nice little epigraph: “Music for lovers, music for broken hearts.” How does that relate idea relate to these songs specifically?
ROBACK: For people who are having a really intense emotional experience in their lives, they often have very intense connection with specific songs. I think it’s always been that way with our music.
STEREOGUM: Music for lovers, music for broken hearts ….that could really apply to your entire back catalog. People have such an emotional attachment to the kind of music you make and it becomes a really powerful thing. I remember when you guys played Coachella that there were people scattered around the audience crying and having this very intense experience with you. Do you feel that when you play live?
SANDOVAL: Sometimes, yes. It’s great.
STEREOGUM: You mentioned that you will be playing shows beginning in October. Will the live setup be different from how you’ve done things in the past?
ROBACK: Not really. Some of our songs are very acoustic and some of it is very electric, so playing live we tend to go back and forth between the two. Trying to project while playing an acoustic song that might be just a little bit fragile — you know, to a big room — it’s different every night. It depends always on the room and the mood of the audience. You never know.
STEREOGUM: I was a little worried about that when I saw you playing at festivals. You guys managed to pull it off, though.
ROBACK: We’re more comfortable in smaller venues and intimate rooms, for sure.
STEREOGUM: Was there ever a point during those seventeen years between records when you wondered if this band was over? When it seemed in doubt that you’d ever make another Mazzy Star record?
ROBACK: You know, we’re still very into playing music together and writing songs together — just like we always were — I don’t think we ever even thought about it, really.
STEREOGUM: I was admiring the artwork and packaging for the new record, which reminded me that I’d always been told that Hope was the one responsible for creating all of the band’s visuals and all the merch and stuff. Is that true?
SANDOVAL: No. I did some of it, but no. Who told you that?
STEREOGUM: A friend of mine who’s in another band — and is an avowed Mazzy Star superfan — mentioned that to me. I’d always heard that as well.
ROBACK: We kind of do it together, and we have friends who help us out from time to time.
STEREOGUM: Your band has one of the most carefully maintained — and most instantly recognizable — aesthetics in all of rock music. Is that something that’s been hard to maintain or is it something that just kind of happens naturally when the two of you make music together?
ROBACK: We’ve always experimented with different sounds and different textures, but ultimately we’ve always just made the music we wanted to make that sounded the way we wanted it to. We make music that we’d also like to hear. That’s what we’ve always done.
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Spin
After 17 years, the enigmatic Hope Sandoval and David Roback are back with the lilting new 'Seasons of Your Day'—thanks in part to a mystery named Herman.
WRITTEN BY Colin Joyce
September 17 2013, 8:00 AM ET
It is painfully clear that a crackly Skype call is as close, literally and figuratively, as I'm going to get to Mazzy Star. Separated by thousands of miles, three computers, and a thick wall of disaffection, there on the other end of the digital wire in Ireland and Norway, respectively, are bandmembers Hope Sandoval and David Roback.
How are you both today?
"Good," says Sandoval.
What are you up to?
"I'm in Norway," offers Roback.
And you, Hope?
Silence.
Hello?
"Hello," Sandoval whispers dryly.
Ah, it's good to have Mazzy Star back. It's been 17 years since we heard a full-length statement, 1996's Among My Swan, from the languorous twosome. That album, like the gorgeous new comeback effort Seasons of Your Day, floated Roback's dusty slide guitar and Sandoval's snowflake vocals over softly swaying rhythms and strummed acoustic six-strings, a seductive respite from much of the era's distorted alt-rock flailing — and a successful one. On the strength of the single "Fade Into You," 1993's So Tonight That I Might See, went all the way to platinum.
A lot can change over the course of nearly two decades, but, as with their sound, Mazzy Star's members' commitment to opaquely carrying out their publicity duties hasn't. (They're infamously monosyllabic and terse — when they say anything at all.) Prior to his efforts in promoting the new album, Roback, a founding member of the L.A. psych-rock bands Opal and the Rain Parade before forming Mazzy, hadn't taken an interview since Bill Clinton was in office. And while Sandoval's work with My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig in Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions has afforded her several opportunities in the interim period for public interaction, it's still not exactly something she relishes. But with initial pleasantries unpleasantly out of the way, the duo lurches into a marginally less stilted discussion of Seasons, emphasizing, however timidly, that the gap between albums was simply the result of life's natural flow.
"We don't think about the rate we work at," explains the 55-year-old Roback.
"We don't really keep track of time," affirms Sandoval, 47.
Nevertheless, after Among My Swan the core duo scattered, with Roback heading to Oslo and Sandoval splitting her time between her native California and Ireland, where she worked on Warm Inventions material. As time passed, it was natural to assume that Mazzy Star was done, or at least on an indefinite hiatus. But Roback says that was never the case.
"We've been working on songs more or less all along," he says. "We were writing and recording songs ever since [Among My Swan]
Despite the distance between them, Roback and Sandoval never stopped creating material, which they diligently stockpiled. The eventual decision to put out ten of those long-gestating songs (two of which, "Common Burn" and "Lay Myself Down," were released as a single in 2011) on their own Rhymes of an Hour label was more pragmatic than nostalgic.
"We wanted to start playing more live concerts," Roback says of the motivation behind the release. "We thought, 'Well, maybe it'd be interesting to have more of our music out there when we start to perform.'"
Sandoval's reasons for returning? "I don't remember," she says. "In a way…" Then, as they so often do with her, the thought slides away unfinished.
There may be a kind of clue in the way that Sandoval lets her sentences trail off, content to let them float into the ether. Musically for better, conversationally for worse, the band's nonchalant musical air isn't a put-on, it seems to bewho they are. Almost like hobbyists, they're just two old friends holing up for days, weeks, months at a time and tinkering away in their home studios.
As different as Mazzy Star's sound once was, it's proved to be influential. The careful production, dreamy melodies, and bittersweet aura is echoed by contemporary acts like Beach House, Tamaryn, and Widowspeak.
"At the time that the first Mazzy Star records were coming out, a lot of the musical trends of the moment weren't quiet and reverential," says Widowspeak singer Molly Hamilton. "When we first started writing songs, we were similarly trying to take a step back from hearing a lot of noise."
Even if they don't like to discuss much, Mazzy will talk, even excitedly (or their version of it), about the work of other musicians, particularly those who guest on Seasons of Your Day. Old friends and longtime Mazzy Star touring members Suki Ewers (keyboards) and Keith Mitchell (drums) both pop up in the album credits and will reportedly accompany Sandoval and Roback on their upcoming fall tour. The late, great Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch, with whom both Sandoval and Roback had collaborated previously, shows up for a space-age etudeon "Spoon," and his spirit imbues both Sandoval and Roback's textured playing on the record.
"Bert's guitar playing was unbelievably unique and brilliant," raves Roback. "He was a really inspiring person to work with."
Ó Cíosóig, who also played drums in the studio with Mazzy, says that Sandoval and Roback’s reticent personalities actually helps make them easy musical partners. "They have a band telepathy," he says. "They don't really need to talk too much about what they do. It seems to happen very naturally. It flows very comfortably."
His involvement, Ó Cíosóig supposes, came about because Mazzy Star's core were recording and he "just [happened] to be there." That laissez-fair spontaneity, coupled with an insistence on putting down their material live, is how [he explains] the wispiness that Sandoval and Roback have managed to maintain over the course of their nearly quarter century career together.
"They really like to give things a live feeling, to try to get a good atmosphere going," He explains of the mood in the studio. "It's just about getting a good feel down and not overdubbing too much."
That vibe is evident on "California," a silvery ballad in the mold of Among My Swan's "Halah." Couplets like the title track's "Won't you let me come inside / I've unlaced all of my pride" are given emotional heft through Sandoval's silky delivery. While Roback's slide lines still function as ellipses between the vocal melodies, elsewhere strings and harpsichord skitter in to fill the negative space.
Ó Cíosóig points out that the album's intricate sound (and long delay) isn't mad-scientistperfectionism in the vein of his usual boss, MBV's Kevin Shields. He assures me that the time and conversation in the studio is more geared toward nailing Mazzy Star's particular mood than it is spending hours dialing in guitar tones.
"We spent a lot of time just hanging out together listening to records — being friends," He explains. "We'd do some music. It was quite casual."
And cryptic. When I ask Roback and Sandoval who made the biggest ideological contribution to the record outside of the two of them, the singer opens up a wormhole.
"Somebody by the name of Herman was involved," she chuckles. "He did a lot of things. You should talk to Herman."
Well, what's Herman's last name? How can I get in touch?
"I'm not sure that we know his last name," she says.
So how did you find him?
"How did we find Herman?" wonders Sandoval. "I think he found us."
And that's as much as she'll say. "Herman" isn't mentioned in any of the press releases, the band's publicist has never heard of him, and even Ó Cíosóig, who swears to me that Roback and Sandoval aren't pulling a fast one, won't share any more.
"He just comes and goes when he feels like it," Ó Cíosóig says about the mystery man. "He'd come and hang out. You could tell whether he liked [a track] or not. I don't know anything about him either, but you get a lot of strange characters around Mazzy Star."
Like many things in Mazzy Star’s world, talking producesmore questions than answers, and more silence than questions, so their records continue to exist in a strange vacuum, free from any pigeonholing pretentiousness or painful pontificating in interviews. A beautiful album, a blink, a decade, another beautiful album. Slow ebbs, long flows.
"We got together when we got together," says Sandoval, "and when we weren't together we did other things." She sighs. "I'm sure it'll continue to be that way."
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The Guardian
Mazzy Star: 'We weren't really in the mood to release music'
After 17 years away, most bands would be happy to make a comeback. Not Mazzy Star. Still, their long-awaited fourth album, Seasons of Your Day, is as captivating as ever
Dorian Lynskey
Thursday 19 September 2013 15.42 BST
You might think that a band letting 17 years elapse between their third and fourth albums was unusual. You might therefore assume that there was an interesting reason for such a hiatus. You might even, recklessly, suppose that they could be pleased to be back. All these thoughts seem reasonable, until you try speaking to Mazzy Star about their new record, Seasons of Your Day.
"I don't think it's unusual at all," singer Hope Sandoval says in a barely audible murmur. "I don't think we were really in the mood to release music."
"We were always recording and writing. We just didn't release any of it publicly," adds guitarist David Roback in the tone of a man on a plane reluctantly looking up from his book to engage in small talk with an irritating fellow passenger.
So why is now the right time to release it? "I don't even know that the time is right or wrong now," he says. "We just did what we wanted to do at the time."
We are talking via videoless Skype. She is in Ireland; he in Norway; they are distant in more ways than one.
Interviewing Mazzy Star is like throwing stones down a deep well and waiting for the faint splash. Every inquiry, however straightforward, is met with a pause that would have made Harold Pinter antsy. There are background noises – the click of a lighter, the bark of a dog – before one of them yields a wearily non-committal response and the cycle begins again. Next to Mazzy Star, such famously reticent interviewees as PJ Harvey and Kate Bush are like Peter Ustinov on Parkinson.
Roback and Sandoval are 55 and 47 respectively and they don't appear to have changed a jot since the early 90s, when one exasperated interviewer compared the process to "drinking sand" and another mentioned "cancelled tours, interview walkouts and profound, belligerent silences". They are equally remote on stage. During one early concert, the audience became so frustrated that they began shouting: "Talk to us!"
So why, frankly, does anybody bother? Because Mazzy Star's music has always been captivating. On Seasons of Your Day, Sandoval sings like someone about to fall asleep for a very long time, while Roback sews her a quilt of dark-velvet Americana: reverb-heavy country-rock tinged with the faintly sinister languor of Velvet Underground ballads. It would have sounded as good in 1998 as it will in 2020. They operate on Mazzy Star time.
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Born in California, Roback was always an outsider. "I was fairly different from the other kids, I didn't get on with them," he once said. "We didn't have many common interests. My hobbies were psychiatry and history … I'd psychoanalyse my friends." After studying art at Berkeley he became a key figure in the early-80s LA psychedelic scene, known as the Paisley Underground, working with the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs and his own acclaimed band the Rain Parade. He left to form Opal with Kendra Smith of Dream Syndicate, until she abruptly walked out of the band during a concert in London in 1987.
Sandoval grew up in a rough part of east LA, the youngest of 10. "My brother was involved with gangs, and everybody knew that in the neighbourhood so nobody messed with you," she once said. She formed a folk duo called Going Home with her friend Sylvia Gomez, who asked Roback to produce their (never released) debut album in 1986. He thought Sandoval's voice was "really intense and completely unique" and said yes. After Smith's departure Sandoval joined Opal, who became Mazzy Star.
As soon as they received attention they resented it, assuming that people only came to their shows because they were the hot new thing. "I think a lot of it is frivolous," sniffed Roback after they released their debut album She Hangs Brightly in 1990. "It's like being popular at school. What does being popular at school mean? It means nothing." Sandoval refused to discuss her lyrics, turned down autograph requests and hated performing live. Only her autograph policy has changed. "Interviews are difficult," she says now. "Performing live is difficult. But," she sighs, "nobody's forcing us to do it."
Unfortunately for them, people persisted in enjoying their music. The stunning Fade Into You became a breakout hit in 1994, driving sales of their second album So Tonight That I May See to platinum status. It still helps pay the bills, appearing in such unlikely settings as Desperate Housewives and CSI: Miami. Do they have any idea why that song was so special? They do not. "I think it's a good song," says Sandoval. "I think a lot of our songs are good."
This period was as extroverted as Mazzy Star got. Sandoval dated the Jesus & Mary Chain's William Reid for three years and sang on the band's wonderful Sometimes Always. After 1996's Among My Swan, however, they slid out of view. A few years ago Sandoval told the LA Times: "I had to beg to get out of my contract with Capitol. They wanted me to work with big producers. I wanted to produce my music, and they weren't having that. I'm sure they were happy to let me go." Maybe she regrets that renegade blurt of candour because now she flatly denies there were any issues at all: "There wasn't any unhappiness. We were comfortable."
They never broke up, says Roback. "We hang out a lot. We always have. And when we hang out we make music." The singer only released music, however, with her new band Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, and electronic producers such as the Chemical Brothers, Death in Vegas and Massive Attack, although she prefers long-distance working relationships. "I don't even like to sing in front of my own band members so it's easier for me if they send me the music and I record my vocals in my own studio."
Roback, meanwhile, worked with musicians including Beth Orton and legendary folk guitarist Bert Jansch, who recorded his contribution to Seasons of Our Day before his death in 2011. Extracting even basic information from Roback proves comically difficult. When did they start writing these songs? "I don't really look for the origin of everything." Why did they finally decide to resume touring last year? "We just thought let's go on a stage someplace. It wasn't any more complex than that." Did they find that they had missed performing live? "We're happy to be where we are now. I don't think we look back on whether we missed something or not." As for anything about their life outside the band, forget it.
There is, I suppose, something impressive about the duo's unwavering purist militancy – their apathy, bordering on revulsion, towards everything to do with music beyond the act of making it. After a miserable hour for all three of us, I'm no longer surprised that they took 17 years to release Seasons of Your Day; I'm amazed they released it at all. Do they even care if anybody beyond their close friends hears their music?
"Maybe, for musicians, it's common to release things more frequently than we do," says Roback. "[We're] like other types of artist. They make their sculpture or painting, they write books or poems, and whether they have an exhibition is almost irrelevant."
Is this a difficult line of work for such reticent people? Pause. "Only when shyness is misinterpreted as arrogance," says Roback. Does that happen in their case? Pause. "I don't really know." Of course not.
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Newsweek
Mazzy Star Reunites After 17 Years With New Album, ‘Seasons of Your Day’
By Nisha Gopalan / September 20, 2013 5:45 AM EDT
Caption: Frazer Harrison - Getty
Silence is the recurring theme throughout any Mazzy Star interview: the long pauses, the truncated sentences, and the reticence that comes with preserving their mystique. It’s also the hushed dream-folk aesthetic that set this band’s music apart from alt rock’s heavier acts (such as Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails) in 1994, when the duo’s soporific single “Fade Into You” broke through to Billboard’s Hot 100. That surprise hit propelled the band’s album So Tonight That I Might See to move more than a million copies.
“We didn’t really experience it,” claims notoriously shy singer Hope Sandoval, who, along with guitarist-songwriter David Roback, has just released Seasons of Your Day, their first album in 17 years. (A North American tour will follow in November.) “We were living in London and just hearing through the grapevine that our music started to get popular.”
Caption: Ellen Ane Aggen - Roback first became influential in his 20s, when he was part of the psych-folk band Rain Parade.
After three albums and roughly a decade together, the group went on an indefinite hiatus in 1997, after Sandoval asked Capitol Records to release them from their contract. “I just didn’t think that we were going in the same direction,” she says. It’s possible that had something to do with label pressure that came after So Tonight That I Might See’s follow-up, Among My Swan, which was received tepidly upon its release in 1996. Sandoval says, “I just wanted to move on, and I think they did too.”
Details are scant about the nearly two-decade interim—and that’s by design. “We’re not going to tell you about our personal lives,” says Roback, 55, who adds elusively, “but we will tell you that our friends all have families.” We do know that Sandoval, now 47, released two full-length solo albums and guested on tracks for groups such as the Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack. And Roback? “I did a song for the Norwegian Cancer Society that was quite satisfying ...” he says, trailing off.
Mazzy Star formed in the late ’80s after both halves had made names for themselves in other bands. Sandoval, who grew up in rough East Los Angeles, formed a folk band, Going Home, with her friend Sylvia Gomez. Still in high school, they opened for noise rockers Sonic Youth and punk influencers the Minutemen. “It was intimidating,” says Sandoval, who names another punk icon, X vocalist Exene Cervenka, as an immeasurable influence. (“Exene taught me how to bend my notes when I sing,” she says. “That’s her style. And I learned that from her.”) Even back then, Sandoval could bewitch an audience with her voice. Once they started playing to the raucous crowd, she says, “everybody sat down. It’s surprising, but they really liked it.”
As a teen on the other side of Los Angeles, Roback had been in a band called the Unconscious with future Bangles frontwoman Susanna Hoffs. “The only thing we ever released were cover versions of two songs: Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ and Lou Reed’s ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ ” In his 20s, Roback won his first fans as part of Rain Parade, an influential psych-folk band in Los Angeles’s paisley-underground scene. Among his followers was Sandoval, who says, “The most amazing live shows that I’ve ever seen were Rain Parade shows.”
Caption: Luz Gallardo - Roback recruited Sandoval to join his band Opal, and the two decided to do something completely new. They darkened their sound and changed their name to Mazzy Star.
Gomez slipped Roback a Going Home tape after a Rain Parade show in 1983. “Sylvia and Hope had this amazing thing going musically,” he says, brightening up. “The intensity was so overwhelming to me. I couldn’t stop listening to it.” Years later, he left Rain Parade to form Opal, another psychedelic band, and when the singer of that project quit, he recruited Sandoval. One day they decided, “Let’s do something completely new.” So they darkened their sound and changed their act’s name to Mazzy Star.
The group’s seminal album, So Tonight That I Might See, has shaped the sound of modern indie bands from Grizzly Bear to Dum Dum Girls, though Sandoval reserves praise for one disciple in particular: “I like Beach House a lot,” she says. Meanwhile, the haunting acoustic “Into Dust” has proven timeless. It continues to soundtrack such disparate pop-culture experiences as Marissa Cooper’s slow-mo overdose on The O.C. and an orgy of annihilation in an ad for the Gears of War 3 videogame. “Sometimes that does happen,” Sandoval says, unfazed by hearing the song in odd places. “It’s not a bad feeling.”
The duo technically made their return two years ago—quietly, of course—with a drawn-out yawn in a way that befits their woozy compositions. In 2011 Sandoval and Roback dropped a comeback single, the twinkling, jazz-lite “Common Burn.” Then, a year later, came a buzz-building stop at Coachella. Still, it wasn’t until July of this year, when Mazzy Star released the beguiling, wistful single “California” and announced a new album, that their occasional hangouts actually started to feel like a reunion.
But if you ask them, they never truly stopped making music—you just never heard it. “We were recording all the time,” Roback says, “just sharing [the music] with our friends.” Seasons of Your Day, which picks up right where Mazzy Star left off—all gauzy atmosphere, guitar flourishes, and ethereal vocals—would convince you as much. The creative drive to collaborate with Sandoval despite their respective side projects came simply because, Roback says, “that’s what we like to do: write songs together. So this album is a collection, a mosaic of songs and ideas. Each song has its own identity.”
As for what precipitated assembling years of material into an actual album, Roback’s explanation is predictably enigmatic. “We were in Norway recently, and all the hills had snow on them. We were rolling down a hill ... We got to the bottom of the hill and said, ‘Let’s release an album.’” Seriously? “That’s the way it’s always been.”
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Rolling Stone
Mazzy Star's 17-Year Silence: 'Music Is Its Own Language'
'We never stopped writing or recording. We just stopped performing and releasing things'
By Steve Baltin | August 20, 2013
Caption - Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star - Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
When Mazzy Star last released an album, 1996's Among My Swan, Bill Clinton was still president. Seventeen years later, the duo of David Roback and Hope Sandoval are set to return with the forthcoming Seasons of Your Day.
Roback tells Rolling Stone the impetus for finally releasing new music was simple: an upcoming tour that will kick off in November. "We just decided to release a collection of songs," he says. "We're going to be doing more concerts in the future, so we thought it would be exciting to perform some of our unreleased newer songs."
Mazzy Star was widely believed to be on hiatus for some time, but Roback and Sandoval say they have continued to make music all these years. "We're always recording music, writing songs," Sandoval says.
"We never stopped writing or recording. We just stopped performing and releasing things," Roback adds.
The prospect of a wealth of hidden Mazzy Star tracks will make the duo's many diehard fans salivate. While Roback isn't sure what will happen with all the material, there is hope people will hear the songs. "Some of them may appear in our live concerts, some of them we may release later," he says.
However, the music they've been making all these years is primarily for themselves. "When I'm working on music with Hope, the person that's foremost in my thoughts is Hope," says Roback. "We tend to get quite caught up in just the making of music for ourselves."
Roback does admit he's curious to see how the band will be greeted after such a long absence. "We've met a lot of interesting people who like our music, and it's always been kind of interesting to us to take our music out of our private world and share it with other people," he says. "It's an interesting thing, if not necessarily always our priority."
He's looking forward to bringing the new music from Seasons of Your Day to the stage. "This new album has a lot of different combinations of instruments, acoustic and electric in different combinations we haven't used so much before. It's kind of a subtle thing we're more aware of, but it's interesting for us to perform this music live now," he says. "There's a lot of subtlety in the music, and to actually put that across live, when it happens, it's really exciting."
For Sandoval, the thought of reintroducing some of their back catalog is just as gratifying. "I personally am excited about playing a lot of the old songs," she says. "I do think they'll fit in with the new music, because it's the same people that are playing the music."
Mazzy Star are known for doing very few interviews, but we found them very entertaining and gracious in their own way. Discussing film, whether it's Antonioni's seminal Blow Up or the more recent An Education, the duo open up. "We have a sort of Chauncey Gardner approach to music," jokes Roback, referring to the famed Peter Sellers character in Being There.
"It's hard to translate musical ideas into words," he says. "I think the music is its own language."
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Stereogum
Q&A: Mazzy Star Talk (A Little) About Seasons Of Your Day, Their First New Album In 17 Years
September 11th 2013
by T. Cole Rachel @ 12:30pm
Mazzy Star 2013
Mazzy Star is one of those rare bands whose very name has come to define a certain aesthetic. Many of us who make a living writing and talking about music are all probably guilty at some point of describing a new record as having a very “Mazzy Star” kind of vibe — i.e. anything pretty and dreamy and druggy and gorgeously slow. If anything, it’s a compliment to the band that they have managed, over the course of 23 years, to carve out their own private and very woozy niche. Mazzy Star makes music that brings to mind hints of the folky Paisley Underground, soporific blues riffs, reverbed guitar lines that go one for days, and a voice — courtesy of Hope Sandoval — with the same sonic quality as opium smoke, rising and weaving through songs that always sound best when played in the middle of the night (or, for those of us of a certain age, perhaps during a college makeout session). It’s been 17 years since the duo last released an album (1996′s Among My Swan), but this month they will break their long silence with the release of Seasons of Your Day, an album that pretty much sounds exactly like Mazzy Star (in the most beautiful way possible). I contacted Sandoval and bandmate David Roback via the world’s most complicated Skype scenario: Hope in Ireland, David in Norway, and myself in Brooklyn. Not surprisingly, given their reclusive nature and the famously reserved quality of their music, the two musicians might just be the unchattiest people I’ve ever tried to talk to. I don’t mind, though. Mazzy Star’s music has seen me (and a lot of people) through some dark and confusing (and also wonderful) times … and even if they aren’t all that psyched about explaining themselves, I’m just happy that they are back.
STEREOGUM: Thanks to both of you for taking a moment to chat with me. It’s been nearly seventeen years since you last released an album. Why the long gap between records?
ROBACK: We’ve been writing and recording music all along, we just haven’t released anything up until now. But we’ve been working on and off all along, so it really doesn’t feel like a break for us.
STEREOGUM: So what made now feel like the right time to release a record?
ROBACK: I’m not even sure that right now is a good time to release a record. I’m not sure there is a good time to do it.
STEREOGUM: The announcement of a new album after so many years away has caused a lot of excitement among your fans. Have you been surprised by the reaction?
SANDOVAL: We don’t really know. It’s hard for us to tell.
ROBACK: We haven’t been playing any shows recently, so I don’t know … but we’ll be starting to play shows again next month, beginning on Halloween.
STEREOGUM: The two of you have been making music together for nearly two decades now. Has your way of working changed much over the years?
SANDOVAL: No.
STEREOGUM: You’ve both made lots of interesting music outside of Mazzy Star, but there seems to be something particularly special that happens when you write songs together. What is it about the dynamic between the two of you that makes for such amazing songs?
ROBACK: Well, we like to play live — at least when we’re working alone — and when we record it’s like we’re playing our songs live in the studio. We like for everything to have a very live kind of feel and the songs kind of mirror that live experience. That’s something that we’ve both always been very into, both me and Hope.
STEREOGUM: I know that a lot of this record was recorded in either California or Norway. David, do you live in Norway?
ROBACK: I actually spend most of my time in London these days. We recorded there as well.
SANDOVAL: I live in California.
STEREOGUM: I’ve always read that touring and playing live was kind of nerve-wracking for you guys. Hope, has that aspect of the band changed for you over the years? Do you find that performing in front of people has gotten easier?
SANDOVAL: No, it hasn’t changed.
STEREOGUM: How do you deal with it?
SANDOVAL: I haven’t really figured it out, to be honest. I just make myself go out there, and hope for the best.
STEREOGUM: The record comes with a nice little epigraph: “Music for lovers, music for broken hearts.” How does that relate idea relate to these songs specifically?
ROBACK: For people who are having a really intense emotional experience in their lives, they often have very intense connection with specific songs. I think it’s always been that way with our music.
STEREOGUM: Music for lovers, music for broken hearts ….that could really apply to your entire back catalog. People have such an emotional attachment to the kind of music you make and it becomes a really powerful thing. I remember when you guys played Coachella that there were people scattered around the audience crying and having this very intense experience with you. Do you feel that when you play live?
SANDOVAL: Sometimes, yes. It’s great.
STEREOGUM: You mentioned that you will be playing shows beginning in October. Will the live setup be different from how you’ve done things in the past?
ROBACK: Not really. Some of our songs are very acoustic and some of it is very electric, so playing live we tend to go back and forth between the two. Trying to project while playing an acoustic song that might be just a little bit fragile — you know, to a big room — it’s different every night. It depends always on the room and the mood of the audience. You never know.
STEREOGUM: I was a little worried about that when I saw you playing at festivals. You guys managed to pull it off, though.
ROBACK: We’re more comfortable in smaller venues and intimate rooms, for sure.
STEREOGUM: Was there ever a point during those seventeen years between records when you wondered if this band was over? When it seemed in doubt that you’d ever make another Mazzy Star record?
ROBACK: You know, we’re still very into playing music together and writing songs together — just like we always were — I don’t think we ever even thought about it, really.
STEREOGUM: I was admiring the artwork and packaging for the new record, which reminded me that I’d always been told that Hope was the one responsible for creating all of the band’s visuals and all the merch and stuff. Is that true?
SANDOVAL: No. I did some of it, but no. Who told you that?
STEREOGUM: A friend of mine who’s in another band — and is an avowed Mazzy Star superfan — mentioned that to me. I’d always heard that as well.
ROBACK: We kind of do it together, and we have friends who help us out from time to time.
STEREOGUM: Your band has one of the most carefully maintained — and most instantly recognizable — aesthetics in all of rock music. Is that something that’s been hard to maintain or is it something that just kind of happens naturally when the two of you make music together?
ROBACK: We’ve always experimented with different sounds and different textures, but ultimately we’ve always just made the music we wanted to make that sounded the way we wanted it to. We make music that we’d also like to hear. That’s what we’ve always done.
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Spin
After 17 years, the enigmatic Hope Sandoval and David Roback are back with the lilting new 'Seasons of Your Day'—thanks in part to a mystery named Herman.
WRITTEN BY Colin Joyce
September 17 2013, 8:00 AM ET
It is painfully clear that a crackly Skype call is as close, literally and figuratively, as I'm going to get to Mazzy Star. Separated by thousands of miles, three computers, and a thick wall of disaffection, there on the other end of the digital wire in Ireland and Norway, respectively, are bandmembers Hope Sandoval and David Roback.
How are you both today?
"Good," says Sandoval.
What are you up to?
"I'm in Norway," offers Roback.
And you, Hope?
Silence.
Hello?
"Hello," Sandoval whispers dryly.
Ah, it's good to have Mazzy Star back. It's been 17 years since we heard a full-length statement, 1996's Among My Swan, from the languorous twosome. That album, like the gorgeous new comeback effort Seasons of Your Day, floated Roback's dusty slide guitar and Sandoval's snowflake vocals over softly swaying rhythms and strummed acoustic six-strings, a seductive respite from much of the era's distorted alt-rock flailing — and a successful one. On the strength of the single "Fade Into You," 1993's So Tonight That I Might See, went all the way to platinum.
A lot can change over the course of nearly two decades, but, as with their sound, Mazzy Star's members' commitment to opaquely carrying out their publicity duties hasn't. (They're infamously monosyllabic and terse — when they say anything at all.) Prior to his efforts in promoting the new album, Roback, a founding member of the L.A. psych-rock bands Opal and the Rain Parade before forming Mazzy, hadn't taken an interview since Bill Clinton was in office. And while Sandoval's work with My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig in Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions has afforded her several opportunities in the interim period for public interaction, it's still not exactly something she relishes. But with initial pleasantries unpleasantly out of the way, the duo lurches into a marginally less stilted discussion of Seasons, emphasizing, however timidly, that the gap between albums was simply the result of life's natural flow.
"We don't think about the rate we work at," explains the 55-year-old Roback.
"We don't really keep track of time," affirms Sandoval, 47.
Nevertheless, after Among My Swan the core duo scattered, with Roback heading to Oslo and Sandoval splitting her time between her native California and Ireland, where she worked on Warm Inventions material. As time passed, it was natural to assume that Mazzy Star was done, or at least on an indefinite hiatus. But Roback says that was never the case.
"We've been working on songs more or less all along," he says. "We were writing and recording songs ever since [Among My Swan]
Despite the distance between them, Roback and Sandoval never stopped creating material, which they diligently stockpiled. The eventual decision to put out ten of those long-gestating songs (two of which, "Common Burn" and "Lay Myself Down," were released as a single in 2011) on their own Rhymes of an Hour label was more pragmatic than nostalgic.
"We wanted to start playing more live concerts," Roback says of the motivation behind the release. "We thought, 'Well, maybe it'd be interesting to have more of our music out there when we start to perform.'"
Sandoval's reasons for returning? "I don't remember," she says. "In a way…" Then, as they so often do with her, the thought slides away unfinished.
There may be a kind of clue in the way that Sandoval lets her sentences trail off, content to let them float into the ether. Musically for better, conversationally for worse, the band's nonchalant musical air isn't a put-on, it seems to bewho they are. Almost like hobbyists, they're just two old friends holing up for days, weeks, months at a time and tinkering away in their home studios.
As different as Mazzy Star's sound once was, it's proved to be influential. The careful production, dreamy melodies, and bittersweet aura is echoed by contemporary acts like Beach House, Tamaryn, and Widowspeak.
"At the time that the first Mazzy Star records were coming out, a lot of the musical trends of the moment weren't quiet and reverential," says Widowspeak singer Molly Hamilton. "When we first started writing songs, we were similarly trying to take a step back from hearing a lot of noise."
Even if they don't like to discuss much, Mazzy will talk, even excitedly (or their version of it), about the work of other musicians, particularly those who guest on Seasons of Your Day. Old friends and longtime Mazzy Star touring members Suki Ewers (keyboards) and Keith Mitchell (drums) both pop up in the album credits and will reportedly accompany Sandoval and Roback on their upcoming fall tour. The late, great Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch, with whom both Sandoval and Roback had collaborated previously, shows up for a space-age etudeon "Spoon," and his spirit imbues both Sandoval and Roback's textured playing on the record.
"Bert's guitar playing was unbelievably unique and brilliant," raves Roback. "He was a really inspiring person to work with."
Ó Cíosóig, who also played drums in the studio with Mazzy, says that Sandoval and Roback’s reticent personalities actually helps make them easy musical partners. "They have a band telepathy," he says. "They don't really need to talk too much about what they do. It seems to happen very naturally. It flows very comfortably."
His involvement, Ó Cíosóig supposes, came about because Mazzy Star's core were recording and he "just [happened] to be there." That laissez-fair spontaneity, coupled with an insistence on putting down their material live, is how [he explains] the wispiness that Sandoval and Roback have managed to maintain over the course of their nearly quarter century career together.
"They really like to give things a live feeling, to try to get a good atmosphere going," He explains of the mood in the studio. "It's just about getting a good feel down and not overdubbing too much."
That vibe is evident on "California," a silvery ballad in the mold of Among My Swan's "Halah." Couplets like the title track's "Won't you let me come inside / I've unlaced all of my pride" are given emotional heft through Sandoval's silky delivery. While Roback's slide lines still function as ellipses between the vocal melodies, elsewhere strings and harpsichord skitter in to fill the negative space.
Ó Cíosóig points out that the album's intricate sound (and long delay) isn't mad-scientistperfectionism in the vein of his usual boss, MBV's Kevin Shields. He assures me that the time and conversation in the studio is more geared toward nailing Mazzy Star's particular mood than it is spending hours dialing in guitar tones.
"We spent a lot of time just hanging out together listening to records — being friends," He explains. "We'd do some music. It was quite casual."
And cryptic. When I ask Roback and Sandoval who made the biggest ideological contribution to the record outside of the two of them, the singer opens up a wormhole.
"Somebody by the name of Herman was involved," she chuckles. "He did a lot of things. You should talk to Herman."
Well, what's Herman's last name? How can I get in touch?
"I'm not sure that we know his last name," she says.
So how did you find him?
"How did we find Herman?" wonders Sandoval. "I think he found us."
And that's as much as she'll say. "Herman" isn't mentioned in any of the press releases, the band's publicist has never heard of him, and even Ó Cíosóig, who swears to me that Roback and Sandoval aren't pulling a fast one, won't share any more.
"He just comes and goes when he feels like it," Ó Cíosóig says about the mystery man. "He'd come and hang out. You could tell whether he liked [a track] or not. I don't know anything about him either, but you get a lot of strange characters around Mazzy Star."
Like many things in Mazzy Star’s world, talking producesmore questions than answers, and more silence than questions, so their records continue to exist in a strange vacuum, free from any pigeonholing pretentiousness or painful pontificating in interviews. A beautiful album, a blink, a decade, another beautiful album. Slow ebbs, long flows.
"We got together when we got together," says Sandoval, "and when we weren't together we did other things." She sighs. "I'm sure it'll continue to be that way."
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The Guardian
Mazzy Star: 'We weren't really in the mood to release music'
After 17 years away, most bands would be happy to make a comeback. Not Mazzy Star. Still, their long-awaited fourth album, Seasons of Your Day, is as captivating as ever
Dorian Lynskey
Thursday 19 September 2013 15.42 BST
You might think that a band letting 17 years elapse between their third and fourth albums was unusual. You might therefore assume that there was an interesting reason for such a hiatus. You might even, recklessly, suppose that they could be pleased to be back. All these thoughts seem reasonable, until you try speaking to Mazzy Star about their new record, Seasons of Your Day.
"I don't think it's unusual at all," singer Hope Sandoval says in a barely audible murmur. "I don't think we were really in the mood to release music."
"We were always recording and writing. We just didn't release any of it publicly," adds guitarist David Roback in the tone of a man on a plane reluctantly looking up from his book to engage in small talk with an irritating fellow passenger.
So why is now the right time to release it? "I don't even know that the time is right or wrong now," he says. "We just did what we wanted to do at the time."
We are talking via videoless Skype. She is in Ireland; he in Norway; they are distant in more ways than one.
Interviewing Mazzy Star is like throwing stones down a deep well and waiting for the faint splash. Every inquiry, however straightforward, is met with a pause that would have made Harold Pinter antsy. There are background noises – the click of a lighter, the bark of a dog – before one of them yields a wearily non-committal response and the cycle begins again. Next to Mazzy Star, such famously reticent interviewees as PJ Harvey and Kate Bush are like Peter Ustinov on Parkinson.
Roback and Sandoval are 55 and 47 respectively and they don't appear to have changed a jot since the early 90s, when one exasperated interviewer compared the process to "drinking sand" and another mentioned "cancelled tours, interview walkouts and profound, belligerent silences". They are equally remote on stage. During one early concert, the audience became so frustrated that they began shouting: "Talk to us!"
So why, frankly, does anybody bother? Because Mazzy Star's music has always been captivating. On Seasons of Your Day, Sandoval sings like someone about to fall asleep for a very long time, while Roback sews her a quilt of dark-velvet Americana: reverb-heavy country-rock tinged with the faintly sinister languor of Velvet Underground ballads. It would have sounded as good in 1998 as it will in 2020. They operate on Mazzy Star time.
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Born in California, Roback was always an outsider. "I was fairly different from the other kids, I didn't get on with them," he once said. "We didn't have many common interests. My hobbies were psychiatry and history … I'd psychoanalyse my friends." After studying art at Berkeley he became a key figure in the early-80s LA psychedelic scene, known as the Paisley Underground, working with the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs and his own acclaimed band the Rain Parade. He left to form Opal with Kendra Smith of Dream Syndicate, until she abruptly walked out of the band during a concert in London in 1987.
Sandoval grew up in a rough part of east LA, the youngest of 10. "My brother was involved with gangs, and everybody knew that in the neighbourhood so nobody messed with you," she once said. She formed a folk duo called Going Home with her friend Sylvia Gomez, who asked Roback to produce their (never released) debut album in 1986. He thought Sandoval's voice was "really intense and completely unique" and said yes. After Smith's departure Sandoval joined Opal, who became Mazzy Star.
As soon as they received attention they resented it, assuming that people only came to their shows because they were the hot new thing. "I think a lot of it is frivolous," sniffed Roback after they released their debut album She Hangs Brightly in 1990. "It's like being popular at school. What does being popular at school mean? It means nothing." Sandoval refused to discuss her lyrics, turned down autograph requests and hated performing live. Only her autograph policy has changed. "Interviews are difficult," she says now. "Performing live is difficult. But," she sighs, "nobody's forcing us to do it."
Unfortunately for them, people persisted in enjoying their music. The stunning Fade Into You became a breakout hit in 1994, driving sales of their second album So Tonight That I May See to platinum status. It still helps pay the bills, appearing in such unlikely settings as Desperate Housewives and CSI: Miami. Do they have any idea why that song was so special? They do not. "I think it's a good song," says Sandoval. "I think a lot of our songs are good."
This period was as extroverted as Mazzy Star got. Sandoval dated the Jesus & Mary Chain's William Reid for three years and sang on the band's wonderful Sometimes Always. After 1996's Among My Swan, however, they slid out of view. A few years ago Sandoval told the LA Times: "I had to beg to get out of my contract with Capitol. They wanted me to work with big producers. I wanted to produce my music, and they weren't having that. I'm sure they were happy to let me go." Maybe she regrets that renegade blurt of candour because now she flatly denies there were any issues at all: "There wasn't any unhappiness. We were comfortable."
They never broke up, says Roback. "We hang out a lot. We always have. And when we hang out we make music." The singer only released music, however, with her new band Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, and electronic producers such as the Chemical Brothers, Death in Vegas and Massive Attack, although she prefers long-distance working relationships. "I don't even like to sing in front of my own band members so it's easier for me if they send me the music and I record my vocals in my own studio."
Roback, meanwhile, worked with musicians including Beth Orton and legendary folk guitarist Bert Jansch, who recorded his contribution to Seasons of Our Day before his death in 2011. Extracting even basic information from Roback proves comically difficult. When did they start writing these songs? "I don't really look for the origin of everything." Why did they finally decide to resume touring last year? "We just thought let's go on a stage someplace. It wasn't any more complex than that." Did they find that they had missed performing live? "We're happy to be where we are now. I don't think we look back on whether we missed something or not." As for anything about their life outside the band, forget it.
There is, I suppose, something impressive about the duo's unwavering purist militancy – their apathy, bordering on revulsion, towards everything to do with music beyond the act of making it. After a miserable hour for all three of us, I'm no longer surprised that they took 17 years to release Seasons of Your Day; I'm amazed they released it at all. Do they even care if anybody beyond their close friends hears their music?
"Maybe, for musicians, it's common to release things more frequently than we do," says Roback. "[We're] like other types of artist. They make their sculpture or painting, they write books or poems, and whether they have an exhibition is almost irrelevant."
Is this a difficult line of work for such reticent people? Pause. "Only when shyness is misinterpreted as arrogance," says Roback. Does that happen in their case? Pause. "I don't really know." Of course not.
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Newsweek
Mazzy Star Reunites After 17 Years With New Album, ‘Seasons of Your Day’
By Nisha Gopalan / September 20, 2013 5:45 AM EDT
Caption: Frazer Harrison - Getty
Silence is the recurring theme throughout any Mazzy Star interview: the long pauses, the truncated sentences, and the reticence that comes with preserving their mystique. It’s also the hushed dream-folk aesthetic that set this band’s music apart from alt rock’s heavier acts (such as Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails) in 1994, when the duo’s soporific single “Fade Into You” broke through to Billboard’s Hot 100. That surprise hit propelled the band’s album So Tonight That I Might See to move more than a million copies.
“We didn’t really experience it,” claims notoriously shy singer Hope Sandoval, who, along with guitarist-songwriter David Roback, has just released Seasons of Your Day, their first album in 17 years. (A North American tour will follow in November.) “We were living in London and just hearing through the grapevine that our music started to get popular.”
Caption: Ellen Ane Aggen - Roback first became influential in his 20s, when he was part of the psych-folk band Rain Parade.
After three albums and roughly a decade together, the group went on an indefinite hiatus in 1997, after Sandoval asked Capitol Records to release them from their contract. “I just didn’t think that we were going in the same direction,” she says. It’s possible that had something to do with label pressure that came after So Tonight That I Might See’s follow-up, Among My Swan, which was received tepidly upon its release in 1996. Sandoval says, “I just wanted to move on, and I think they did too.”
Details are scant about the nearly two-decade interim—and that’s by design. “We’re not going to tell you about our personal lives,” says Roback, 55, who adds elusively, “but we will tell you that our friends all have families.” We do know that Sandoval, now 47, released two full-length solo albums and guested on tracks for groups such as the Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack. And Roback? “I did a song for the Norwegian Cancer Society that was quite satisfying ...” he says, trailing off.
Mazzy Star formed in the late ’80s after both halves had made names for themselves in other bands. Sandoval, who grew up in rough East Los Angeles, formed a folk band, Going Home, with her friend Sylvia Gomez. Still in high school, they opened for noise rockers Sonic Youth and punk influencers the Minutemen. “It was intimidating,” says Sandoval, who names another punk icon, X vocalist Exene Cervenka, as an immeasurable influence. (“Exene taught me how to bend my notes when I sing,” she says. “That’s her style. And I learned that from her.”) Even back then, Sandoval could bewitch an audience with her voice. Once they started playing to the raucous crowd, she says, “everybody sat down. It’s surprising, but they really liked it.”
As a teen on the other side of Los Angeles, Roback had been in a band called the Unconscious with future Bangles frontwoman Susanna Hoffs. “The only thing we ever released were cover versions of two songs: Bob Dylan’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ and Lou Reed’s ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ ” In his 20s, Roback won his first fans as part of Rain Parade, an influential psych-folk band in Los Angeles’s paisley-underground scene. Among his followers was Sandoval, who says, “The most amazing live shows that I’ve ever seen were Rain Parade shows.”
Caption: Luz Gallardo - Roback recruited Sandoval to join his band Opal, and the two decided to do something completely new. They darkened their sound and changed their name to Mazzy Star.
Gomez slipped Roback a Going Home tape after a Rain Parade show in 1983. “Sylvia and Hope had this amazing thing going musically,” he says, brightening up. “The intensity was so overwhelming to me. I couldn’t stop listening to it.” Years later, he left Rain Parade to form Opal, another psychedelic band, and when the singer of that project quit, he recruited Sandoval. One day they decided, “Let’s do something completely new.” So they darkened their sound and changed their act’s name to Mazzy Star.
The group’s seminal album, So Tonight That I Might See, has shaped the sound of modern indie bands from Grizzly Bear to Dum Dum Girls, though Sandoval reserves praise for one disciple in particular: “I like Beach House a lot,” she says. Meanwhile, the haunting acoustic “Into Dust” has proven timeless. It continues to soundtrack such disparate pop-culture experiences as Marissa Cooper’s slow-mo overdose on The O.C. and an orgy of annihilation in an ad for the Gears of War 3 videogame. “Sometimes that does happen,” Sandoval says, unfazed by hearing the song in odd places. “It’s not a bad feeling.”
The duo technically made their return two years ago—quietly, of course—with a drawn-out yawn in a way that befits their woozy compositions. In 2011 Sandoval and Roback dropped a comeback single, the twinkling, jazz-lite “Common Burn.” Then, a year later, came a buzz-building stop at Coachella. Still, it wasn’t until July of this year, when Mazzy Star released the beguiling, wistful single “California” and announced a new album, that their occasional hangouts actually started to feel like a reunion.
But if you ask them, they never truly stopped making music—you just never heard it. “We were recording all the time,” Roback says, “just sharing [the music] with our friends.” Seasons of Your Day, which picks up right where Mazzy Star left off—all gauzy atmosphere, guitar flourishes, and ethereal vocals—would convince you as much. The creative drive to collaborate with Sandoval despite their respective side projects came simply because, Roback says, “that’s what we like to do: write songs together. So this album is a collection, a mosaic of songs and ideas. Each song has its own identity.”
As for what precipitated assembling years of material into an actual album, Roback’s explanation is predictably enigmatic. “We were in Norway recently, and all the hills had snow on them. We were rolling down a hill ... We got to the bottom of the hill and said, ‘Let’s release an album.’” Seriously? “That’s the way it’s always been.”
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