I discovered this series about ten—thirteen years ago, and I picked up a couple of them. One was by Bryan Waterman, who is an academic, and wrote on Television’s Marquee Moon, which is a pretty good volume. Another one I really liked was written by Alex Niven on Oasis, and he made this convincing case that Oasis were once working-class socialist champions, and I thought that was so remarkable.

But what I liked more than anything was that the authors coming out in this series were not just academics. There were creative writers, authors from all over the world, and authors from all sorts of different places and venues—people wanting to champion or talk about an album.

And so, over ten years ago, I started thinking, like anyone who reads the series, if I could do one, what album would I talk about? Very early on, I wanted to talk about Mazzy Star. I didn’t know which album of theirs I wanted to talk about, but I knew I wanted to talk about Mazzy Star.

And I just kept putting it off, thinking, “I don’t know if I could do this. I don’t know what I would say in thirty to forty thousand words. I don’t know if I could get to that word limit—let alone actually doing it, let alone getting that contract and having the chance to write it.”

But I think the coolest thing about 33⅓ is that they still do an open call every year or every other year, and they pick manuscripts they think are interesting or different.

Finally, two years ago, I took the plunge and said, I’m just going to do this. I’m going to write about Mazzy Star. I was going through grad school at the time when I submitted the proposal, and I was starting to get sick of writing for an academic audience—which can be formulaic. Especially because publishing can be glacial. You write something, and it takes forever to come out.

I submitted the proposal and was very fortunate to hear back three or four months later. Then I was given a nine-month deadline, or a year deadline, to do this, and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I have to write this.

Which became the coolest thing to tell my wife, and to tell friends and family—that I was busy—even though I was listening to the music on repeat. It was work. I had to do this, and I had a lot of fun. Even if you don’t know the band, or if you don’t know much about Mazzy Star, one of the most interesting things about them is that they were very media-averse. They were extremely media-reluctant.

So there are interviews from the late 80s, the 90s, and into the early 2000s, but sometimes they contradicted each other. Sometimes they contradicted things they had said before. Sometimes they just made things up or came up with stories that were amusing to fans and probably irritating to journalists.

And part of the fun for me was thinking, 

I’ve been doing academic research, I’ve been writing for academics—maybe I can bring over that skill of close reading, not necessarily to demythologize what they wanted to put out, but to have fun and try to reconcile some of those contradictions.

And at the end of the day, having grown up in LA, having grown up with Mazzy Star as the soundtrack of my life, I just wanted to do something that blended the personal with the research—something that felt like a creative piece of nonfiction.

There are multiple members of the band. It is an unfortunate thing that I really focus only on the two individuals who were there from beginning to end. David Roback, who was the guitarist for Mazzy Star and a co-songwriter and the lead singer, Hope Sandoval. It’s believed that she lives in Ireland, and maybe sometimes in California or the UK, but we’re not fully sure. She’s still very averse and reluctant, so I wasn’t able to get ahold of the band.

I don’t even know the last time Hope Sandoval gave a public interview. It’s been some years, other than an obituary for her bandmate Roback. And so I knew, going into this, that I probably wasn’t going to have a chance to talk to the members.

But I knew that I would have a lot of fun talking to other fans, because the fandom for Mazzy Star is intense—or at the very least, very active. There are a lot of great forums and places people have turned to where they’re willing to upload or send scanned copies of 1980s and 1990s fanzines and magazines from that time. They even offer to translate interviews from places like Germany and Spain—these fun interviews the band gave over the years.

I wasn’t necessarily researching all the time. I was contacting fans—former fan club presidents, which is a thing I feel doesn’t really exist anymore—and having all sorts of people in the community send things my way. In addition to that, I was digging through my family’s garage and pulling out old archives I had, because I refuse to throw anything away from this band.

Ongoing thread. More from Anthony Gomez III to follow.