Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See is part of a series called 33 ⅓ from Bloomsbury. Each book in this series is reportedly about one band and one album that the author believes is significant. Significant in any way to the culture, to them personally, or to something else. My book is about the 90s band Mazzy Star, which is primarily driven by two major musicians: David Roback and Hope Sandoval.

So many people are coming back to this band. A couple of different songs, but especially a song called Fade Into You, is one of the most played songs in film and TV. It was voted that by Vulture Magazine in 2013. It is one of the most commonly used songs on TikTok, on YouTube, soundtracking all sorts of different things.

I wanted to get back to this band and who they really were. They were a group of outsiders, chronicling a kind of Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore—a Los Angeles that I had the benefit of growing up near in the 1990s, but that is now, at least to me, completely gone.

They were thinking about LA as gentrifying, LA as changing in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. In the album I wrote about, So Tonight That I Might See—which is kind of their big hit, if you want to call it that—I argue that they were thinking about this changing city, this changing time, and this changing force of music, as what was once alternative was suddenly being bought up, appropriated, and taken over by the corporate mainstream, and by MTV.

What I also wanted to do was address something I think people often forget about, or unfortunately erase, when they talk about the band. I wanted to talk about the lead singer, Hope Sandoval, who’s also a co-songwriter in the band. I wanted to talk about her as a Mexican woman because so often—especially back then—people just never talked about it. And to my surprise, a lot of people didn’t even know she was a Mexican-American woman.

She was touching on subjects in a way that was so obvious to me, having grown up in the greater Los Angeles area and having been part of a Mexican-American family. I kept thinking, why aren’t people realizing this? Why aren’t they realizing that she’s touching on things that are so familiar to me, but feel foreign to them?

I thought the book could be an opportunity to talk about not just my love for the music, and not just my love for LA and their love for a fading LA, but also this kind of rise and fall—and rise again—of what was 20th-century Chicanx politics.

Mazzy Star is a band that comes out in the late 80s, but they really come into their own in the early 90s. They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush new songs when all of a sudden Nirvana’s Nevermind becomes a kind of huge hit, and their original independent label, Rough Trade, goes bankrupt.

And so Geffen Records, Capitol Records—which Capitol is who they sign with—all these major companies just start buying up every alternative band they could think of. They buy up this band, and encourage them, in the kindest sense of the term, to record stuff, to get things out there, and push them on MTV and other kind of live formats. If there’s a reason for their success, it is partially corporate advertised—at least traditional success, I should say.

Ongoing thread. More from Anthony Gomez III to follow.