Mazzy Star
American alternative rock band

Mazzy Star were an American alternative rock band formed in 1988 in Santa Monica, California, from remnants of the group Opal. Founding member David Roback's friend Hope Sandoval became the group's vocalist when Kendra Smith left Opal.
Mazzy Star is best known for the song "Fade into You", which brought the band commercial success in the mid-1990s and was the group's biggest mainstream hit, earning extensive exposure on MTV, VH1, and radio airplay. Roback and Sandoval were the creative center of the band, with Sandoval as lyricist and Roback as composer of the majority of the band's material until his death in Los Angeles on February 24, 2020, from cancer. Mazzy Star's founding drummer Keith Mitchell, originally part of Opal, died on May 14, 2017, also from cancer. The EP Still released on June 1, 2018, was dedicated to Keith Mitchell and stage manager Tom Cashen who also died in 2017. Following Roback's death in 2020, Sandoval and Ewers are the last surviving members of the band's original lineup.
The band released the album She Hangs Brightly in 1990, So Tonight That I Might See in 1993 (the album went platinum in 1995), and Among My Swan in 1996.
The band's fourth studio album, Seasons of Your Day, was released in 2013, followed by the EP Still in 2018.
History
Opal and Paisley Underground (1981–1987)
Mazzy Star has deep roots within the Californian Paisley Underground movement of the early 1980s.
The public source identifies “Mazzy Star” as american alternative rock band. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mazzy, Star and American.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1132765. VIAF identifies the subject as 144456516. The Library of Congress control number is no98016122. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2020, 2017 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mazzy Star” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.