"Fade into You"

There are two possible scenarios when I go the used cd store. 1) I have a list of specific titles to seek out; 2) I randomly poke around to find some treasures. I've noticed that each of these scenarios shapes what I walk out of the store with. In scenario 1, it tends to be more recent items. In scenario 2, I end up filling gaps in my collection. My most recent trip was the latter.

Among those discs that I should already have owned is Mazzy Star's breakthrough, So Tonight That I Might See. I always loved "Fade Into You" (their biggest hit, topping out at #44), and my college roommate hipped me to the rest of the album. At any rate, I finally got around to rectifying this album's absence in my collection.

"Fade Into You" is a sublimely beautiful song, undoubtedly one of my favorite singles of the 1990s. It also is one of those tunes that very quickly gets the memory machine churning out all of the personal and temporal associations you might have with the song. The album as a whole is quite good, and holds up very well in 2011. It was also the perfect aural driving companion on a rainy, gray Monday following a Super Bowl loss.

There were two versions of the video. Watching the black and white clip, my thought was "this is the one that I remember." Watching the color clip, I thought "Wait, I remember this one too." Hypothesis: both were in rotation on MTV that year, or at least on 120 Minutes.





And for good measure, here is a performance from 120 Minutes.