This week I have a song from the 90s for you. The band was one of my favorite bands at that time and I am sure you will all remember their hypnotic song. It was written by lyricist Hope Sandoval and composer David Roback, who also served as producer.
Here is the song for this week;
"Fade Into You"
This ballad about unrequited love was the opening track of Mazzy Star's second studio album, So Tonight That I Might See. The song, which finds vocalist Hope Sandoval yearning to connect with the object of her affection on a soul level, was also the California alt-rock band's first and only entry on the Hot 100. It also peaked at #3 on the Alternative chart.
Regarded as one of the top songs of the '90s, the band's breakout hit boosted the album to platinum status, with more than a million sales. The exposure also thrust Mazzy Star into the spotlight - a place they never wanted to be. Hope Sandoval and David Roback, the band's producer/guitarist, were indifferent to fame. The notoriously taciturn duo didn't like performing live or doing interviews, and Sandoval refused to speak about her lyrics. Looking back on their seminal tune in 2013, Sandoval would only tell The Guardian: "I think it's a good song."
In a 2018 interview with News.com.au, Roback said he and Sandoval wrote the music and lyrics in one day. "It came almost at the same time. We weren't trying to write a hit song - we were just writing a song," he explained. "I think we had a melody and a feel and we just followed that feel. And that became the song... It was acoustic guitar and both of us singing and after we'd written the song then we arranged it for other instruments - piano and slide guitar and drums. But it started out as an acoustic song."
If you're feeling nostalgic pangs for days gone by when you hear "Fade Into You," that was never Mazzy Star's intention. "It was never intended to be a nostalgic song," said Roback. "Unless you were meant to think about nostalgia for the present because it really was about the present."
Roback, who died in 2020, explained that music was their singular focus, not the fame or the fans. "We're not so concerned about the outside world," he told Uncut in 2013. "It's a very internal process that we're involved in. The outside world is really not on our minds, in so far as the music is concerned. We're really doing it in our own world for ourselves. We're engaged in the stories of each individual song. It is its own world unto itself."
Two music videos were completed for "Fade Into You." The first was directed by Kevin Kerslake and premiered on MTV in late October 1993, several weeks after the album's release. It features the band performing in front of a projection depicting white clouds in a black sky, and is interlaced with slow-motion footage of the band in various locales in the Mojave Desert. Portions of this video were filmed at the same location U2 shot the artwork for The Joshua Tree.
A second music video was directed by Merlyn Rosenberg and first aired in February 1994. Known as the Black and White version for its monochromic content throughout, the intentionally grainy, distorted footage shows the band performing in a darkened Burlesque-era ballroom, and is interspersed with footage of Sandoval and Roback at various sites around San Francisco, including the All Seasons Hotel (now the Crescent Hotel) and neighboring Stockton Street tunnel, coupled with genuine footage of the same sites shot in the 1930s. Only the latter music video was broadcast internationally.
Here are the 7 versions I picked for you;
- Ben Harper - "Fade Into You"
- Miley Cyrus - "Fade Into You"
- Iron & Wine - "Fade Into You"
- Inhaler - "Fade Into You"
- Bjonr ft. Tom Bailey - "Fade Into You"
- Migala - "Fade Into You"
- Alexis Perry - "Fade Into You"
