DB's Song of the Day (day 175): "IN THE KINGDOM" (2013) Mazzy Star

Today is the birthday of Hope Sandoval, lead singer of Mazzy Star, and of her other band, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions. Mazzy Star created a sound that suited the Nineties and seemed to stay there—their three albums date from 1990, 1993, and 1996. I didn’t follow Sandoval and her subsequent band, though I did hear Bavarian Fruit Bread at some point. The lure of Mazzy Star wasn’t only Sandoval’s unmistakable voice, it was also the varied textures of David Roback’s guitar, so I stayed behind with Mazzy.

So imagine my surprise to find Mazzy Star returned in 2013 with a new album that sounds like it picks up right where Among My Swan (my favorite of theirs) left off. Indeed, the latter album ends with the haunting track “Look on Down from the Bridge,” which is a song about moving on, and the new album, Seasons of Your Day, opens with today’s song, “In the Kingdom,” and the lines: “I took the train into the city / You know the one that goes under the bridge.” Coming back into the city, under the bridge, returning to where you once belonged. The song has that sense of coming back and getting on with it: “If all is right in the kingdom tonight / You know we’ll play songs in this town.”  Love the way she goes up on "king-dom tonight," letting us feel like, yes, maybe all is right.

I saw Sandoval, Roback and company play songs in this town (well, NYC), back in the fall, and it was one of those “get back” moments in a lot of ways. My daughter and I had imbibed quite a bit of Mazzy Star in her teen years, and now she’s in her thirties. Time has marched inexorably on and that might be cause for some kind of melancholic consideration of how no one—least of all the band members—are as young as they were when we first loved them. And other things have happened—Bert Jansch, who plays on one track on the album, has died, as has William Cooper, who plays violin on the album’s title track. We might say that the album has a certain survivor quality, paying tribute to the notion that, just maybe, we can go back to where we were and pick up where we left off. At least that was the takeaway that worked for me.

And today’s track worked for me right from the start, that organ sound seeming like it could be at home at a carnival/funeral, then the loopy, bell-like sounds of Roback’s slide, gliding in like glistening oil. Then—that voice. The drawl she brings to: “I thought I was list-en-ing” (that word, twanged) / “To a band play a song that changed me” (and she suddenly becomes lightened, giving us as much as we might need of retrospect and present joy at once), then goes into six “hey”s, the first three giving us the lift of the melody, and the second three almost trailing off, meditatively.

Listening to Hope Sandoval sing just has to make you love women. I’m not saying you have to love her, specifically. But her voice exults in a quality that only female voices have, that timbre that is almost tremulous but, in her case, so assured, so relaxed—and not in a mellow, grooving way, but in a kind of feline, graceful way. She lets whispers and slurs act as some would treat grace notes, making it feel as if her breath is in your ear, on your neck. And then she hits the glockenspiel a bit after the second verse, creating the little bell-tones that inflect the lovely guitar figures Roback seems able to spin out endlessly. Fascinating as his guitar is—and he’s probably the guitarist of his generation I most like listening to—we’re always waiting for that voice to come back, to tease us again with its edgy sweetness, playing at its immediate identity as “the waif makes good,” singing a song that “changed me.”

Happy birthday, Hope!

DB's Song of the Day (day 129): "BLUE FLOWER" (1990) Mazzy Star

Mazzy Star got our attention with So Tonight That I May See, released in 1993, and appropriate for a somewhat subdued transferal, in our world, from Princeton, NJ, to Hamden, CT. Kajsa, with my tutelage, was making discoveries of early R.E.M., John Cale, Leonard Cohen, and Mazzy Star fit in well with all that. Going back for their first album—the one with the lovely photo of a hotel in Brussels—She Hangs Brightly (1990), I found a sound even more in tune with how the Sixties returned in the Nineties, and not just because I was trying all that ancient history out on KDB. Mazzy Star’s sound is at times like a merger of The Doors and the Velvet Underground, and on their first album, and today’s song in particular, they seem about as dylanesque as anything could be expected to be after the Eighties. Recently I got the album on a new vinyl pressing and, need I say, it is so much better than the CD. All their albums are better on vinyl but this one in particular.

“Blue Flower” is a track by a band called Slapp Happy from 1972, who did it as more up pop. The sound Mazzy Star—and especially David Roback, their resident guitar genius—gets here churns more toward something edgier, grungier even.  And a lot of the feeling comes from Hope Sandoval’s almost slurry vocal that seems to come from some in vino veritas moment. “Superstar in your own private movie / I wanted just a minor part / But I’m no fool / I know you’re cool / I never really wanted your heart.”

That slur is maybe what makes me think of the song as “dylanesque”—it’s got a bit of the put-down in it, and Sandoval sings it with as much glee as she ever manifests (indeed, that first album has her at her most mercurial, vocal-wise, while I would say its Among My Swan (1996) that has the most mercurial guitar sounds from Roback). “Blue Flower”—great title by the way, since that’s the emblem of German Romanticism via Novalis—struts with a happy to be on the street and away from you vibe. “Waiting for the signal to change"—whether behind the wheel or on the curb, there’s a lot to see in those moments, no? “Walkin' through the city / Your boots are high-heeled and are shinin' bright” has that strut, and a line like—as Sandoval delivers it—“have you forgotten what your love can do” seems to claw a little bit too, like your love can do so much but you ain’t been spreading it lately. Can you spare it, sporty?

I suppose that’s the tie in for me today. That feeling of something being withheld though it maybe once was offered. Like any kind of fellow feeling, it comes and goes, and what I like about the feel of this song (the video shows them playing it on the Jools Holland show in 1994) is that the singer seems fine with all that, as if it’s a breath of fresh air to be out and about with no strings, no hard feelings, and no expectations, as the Stones might say.

“I never really wanted your heart”—just “a minor part” would be fine in the movie of the superstar’s life—which could be a way of saying “I know you’ve got more important people on your radar,” but is also a way of saying, “there’s only so much I ever wanted to give you or to take from you.” “Never really wanted your heart” isn’t a put-down, if the heart is never offered, but it doesn’t strike me as a sour grapes line. She means that all she really wanted was,  uh, maybe some other part.

Flower in the morning rain certainly suits this morning.