I have two moments I’ll just bring up. The first is a short one. Fairly early on in the book, I briefly offer an anecdote from the band’s preview of their second album in ’92. They performed a concert in L.A., and the audience, at the end of the concert, started to clap.

You would think that at this moment the band would be pleased. You’d think they’d be happy. But actually, the lead singer leans into the microphone and says, “Why were you clapping? You weren’t even listening.”

The audience fell into a hush. Invited members of the media were looking puzzled. If you don’t know anything about the band, hopefully this is enough to interest you, to keep going, to learn why they’re like this. And if you do know about the band, you will have some sort of reference to understand their philosophy. This is who they are.

And you get that ticket, you get that wristband, to join the Mazzy Star fandom. I think that’s kind of an interesting moment. And I pray that’s fascinating to some people.

The other thing I want to think about—and it’s another thing I hope people could turn to—is that even if you don’t know anything about Mazzy Star, even if it’s completely new to you, even if you’re not a big 1990s music person, the forces that drove them together are probably something you already know about, even if you don’t realize it.

Because David Roback, who is, again, the co-songwriter of Mazzy Star and a great, influential guitarist, is responsible for some of the biggest pop rise in the ’80s. He’s once dating someone named Susanna Hoffs, who eventually goes on to lead the Bangles. He’s part of a music scene of underground  musicians who are often middle class, often college dropouts or autodidacts. And he’s thinking about different kinds of styles and sounds.

Different styles and sounds that Prince is so happy and enthusiastic about that it’s rumored he even names his estate after their scene—the scene of the Paisley Underground. They’re a band that are the kind of your favorite artists’ favorite artists.

Kurt Cobain once scribbled them down as one of the great bands, or one of his favorite bands of all time. And so I think there’s—hopefully—whatever page you turn to, you’re going to open up and say, wait, they were connected to this thing I do know about, or they were part of this scene that I have heard about.

Or, if anything else, they were part of—even if people don’t often think about them this way—they were part of a rise of Chicano activism, a revival of Chicano activism, in the ’80s and ’90s. At least according to me, and at least I want to kind of put forward that line of thinking.

Of course, I want the book to be shared by as many people as possible. But my hope is that I can pick it back up a couple of years from now and realize that I was able to express my thoughts about them—that I was able to express all these things I had built up since I first heard them as a kid, as a teenager.

More than anything, I hope that when people pick it up, they recall a kind of time—one that feels almost unfathomable now—when it was possible in Los Angeles for people from opposite sides of the city to come together and create art. To create art without the conditions of the internet and social media demanding an output, demanding constant feedback, demanding a kind of social presence from artists.

I hope it makes people wonder whether something has been lost—what that thing might be—by demanding that contemporary artists always be online, or by expecting them to maintain some kind of ongoing communication with their fan base. 

Because I think there’s something that—it sounds naive or maybe cliché to say—but there’s something so powerful about artists who are simply willing to be artists, to create, without that relationship. To put their world out there and let us sink into it.

Very early on in the book, I say that Mazzy Star is part of a lineage of artists. You could think of someone like J. D. Salinger, who was reclusive and wrote in a bunker—we still don’t even know what he wrote. This is part of the excitement. Donna Tartt is another example I mention. Isn’t it amazing that after twelve years, she can publish a book and there’s genuine excitement—that we allow time to build up for that?

I also talk about D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, and Elena Ferrante, especially woman-fronted artists and bands who are capable of doing this. We don’t often allow women, I think, the room, the time, and the space. But here is a group that chose to do that—chose to take decades if they wanted to, or to take years out of the spotlight if they wanted to, just to create.