I Wanna Hold The Hand Inside You
When I first heard Mazzy Star’s dreamy 90’s soft rock song, Fade Into You, I remember being so blissfully stuck on that first line: I wanna hold the hand inside you.
It seems such an intimate sentiment, like when someone reaches out to touch the most private parts of you. Through gentle acoustic strums, it captures the threshold between the physical and emotional. Each line presents a mirrored perspective of two people who through love become one. The feeling of fading into someone else is so sacred, but also so commonly felt between people in love- wanting someone so much that you merge into them and let yourself disappear.
To express that feeling of dissolving into another person within a song, is sublime. Mazzy Star paints it beautifully: living inside someone, watching their mind turn and their heart beat. Doing so quietly, sometimes so silent that they don’t know you’re in there- “strange, you never knew”. When you look at yourself you see that you have disappeared- “I look to you and I see nothing”, but when you see them, you see your religion- “I look to you to see the truth”.
Who better to sing it than the beautiful, ghostly, Hope Sandoval. There on the darkened stage, she stands like a figment of a dream, her head bowed and her long hair draping down in messy strands over her face. She creates a certain magic beneath the lights. Her songs are like a meditation and she appears in a completely reflective state. She is a ghost of the type of woman that appears in this song. This is a girl that is outwardly unassuming, yet once she begins to move or talk, she changes. She becomes phantasmic, stuck within the grips of romance and heartbreak. Though she retreats within her own inner shell, she dips into reality just to feel the rawness of desire.
Fade Into You is as intrinsic as a primal love. It feels like a crush that you cannot obtain, a deep understanding, a twin flame, a bitterness arising from the internal threshold of believing and obtaining. Konstantinos Pappis enters a deep dive of the song and the band for Our Culture Magazine, where he explains that “there’s not much to say about Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’. Not because everything’s already been said, necessarily, but because the dream pop group’s 1993 single is not really the kind of song you talk about. You just sink into its ethereal world, letting those reverb-drenched vocals and hypnotic slide guitar speak directly to your soul.”
I often find myself in the dark of my room, listening to the song and pretending my pillows are the words and the edges of my duvet are the strums of the guitar chords cradling me as they rise and fall like a big metaphoric cup. This is a song that doesn’t ask you why you are the way you are. This is a song that requires no answer or reason. This is a song that lets you simply be.
