Mazzy Star is an American band formed in Santa Monica, California, in 1989 from remnants of the group Opal. Founding member David Roback’s friend Hope Sandoval became the group’s vocalist. They began by using the Opal name and material but. Sandoval stated that she was unhappy with the material, and expressed an interest in wanting to “start something completely new”. The pair quickly composed and recorded seven new tracks in San Francisco, and renamed the band Mazzy Star. Written over a year before Mazzy Star’s inception, the track “Ghost Highway” is the duo’s only original song to not feature a writing credit from Sandoval.
Thier first album She Hangs Brightly was released in April 1990 on Rough Trade and, although it was not an immediate commercial success, the album established the duo as a recurrent fixture on alternative rock radio, with lead single “Blue Flower” peaking at No. 29 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart. The album would go on to sell over 70,000 copies in the UK. Their follow-up ‘So Tonight That I Might See’ was released in September 1993. A year after its release, the album yielded an unexpected hit single. “Fade Into You” which peaked at No. 44 to become their first Top 50 single. In April 1995, the album was certified platinum for sales of over 1 million.
In 2009, So Tonight That I Might See album track “Into Dust” debuted at No. 71 and stayed one week on the U.K. singles chart when it featured on a commercial for Virgin Media. Two years later, the song appeared on the “Dust to Dust” trailer for Gears of War 3 and spent a further four weeks on the chart, reaching a new peak of No. 47; while it also became the band’s first song to ever place on the Irish singles chart, where it peaked at No. 40.
In the immediate aftermath of Mazzy Star’s dissolution, Sandoval joined with Colm O’ Ciosoig to form Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions. They produced three albums between 2000-2004. Here is a track from their first collabration.
Mazzy Star reconvened several times the subsequent years, particularly in producing a fourth studio album ‘Seasons of your Day’.
