The song “Fade Into You” is about a person who is in love with a damaged person. This damaged person is not capable of understanding true affection because he or she is totally broken from the inside. The writer says that this person is so deeply in love with the broken person that she wants to become one with him. She wants to incorporate her soul with his. Unfortunately, the broken person is not even aware that she loves him.
In this article, I explain you the meaning of this song. Let us begin!
“I want to hold…that is true”
The writer wants to hold the hands of the person she loves. When she says she wants to hold hands inside him, she means that she wants to support him. She wants walk him at every point of life. By inside she means inside his heart. It means she will stand by him, no matter what happens. She is ready to give her shoulders.
Everything around her looks imaginary when he is not with her. The world looks unreal to her when she is not with him. When she says she wants to take a real breath, she means being with him and only with him gives meaning to her life. She is alive only when she is around him. By true breath, she means she realizes that she is alive when she is around him. The meaning of these words is deep. This girl is madly in love with the person. She questions her existence when the person is not around her.
“I look…see the truth”
Though she loves him so much, he sees nothing in him. Meaning he is not in love with her. He doesn’t know how much she loves him. By nothing she means she is unable to understand what he feels about her. She is looking into him for a response. She wants him to love her back. But in return she gets nothing.
In the next line, she says she is looking to him to know the truth. She would be satisfied at least if she knows that this person loves her or not. The person is so broken that he is not able to see anything other than his pain. His pain is not allowing him to understand the truth that a girl is crazy about him. Though the girl knows that he doesn’t see the same way just like him, she is looking into him with a hope. She wants him to understand her, love her back.
“You live…in shadows”
The broken person is living his own life. Meaning he is in another world. He is in pain. He is not aware of the things that is happening around him. He is so engulfed by his pain. She says that he is going into shadows. Meaning he is walking to the dark. Shadow is not real. His pain and past are hurting him so badly. His shadow is compared to his past. Just like the shadow, his past is not real. He can see him just he sees his shadow. But he cannot change it.
“You will come….what is not there”
She almost gives up on him. She says if he is continuing what he is doing, he will go blind. She is trying to put some light into his darkness. She believes that her love for him will bring him out from his pain. She wants to help him. She is not able to see him suffer. She wants to see him happy. When she says “colors your eyes”, she wants him to live his life. She wants him to fly out with beautiful colors. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand any of this. He is after something that doesn’t exist anymore, his past.
“Fade into..never knew”
The girl is completely burying herself towards him. Her love for him is engulfing her completely. As she is not getting any response from him, she is fading. She is disappointed. Sadly, he doesn’t even have a clue that she exists and is undergoing all this thinking about him.
“A stranger’s light…your heart”
The girl feels that she is a complete stranger to him. She compares her love for him to light. As her love is not acknowledged, it is lost. Her love is without address. It is without home. The boy doesn’t know she loves him. That is why the writer says that her heart is without a home.
About the song: background, lyrics, background
“Fade Into You” is a hypnotic ballad about unrequited love, the first track from the second studio album So Tonight That I Might See… As mentioned above, a song in which vocalist Hope Sandoval longs to connect with the object of her affection on a soul level , also became the first and only recording by a Californian alt-rock band to hit the Hot 100… “Fade Into You” is the group’s popular hit and is considered one of the best songs of the 90s!
and lifted the album to platinum status with over a million sales… The composition also drew attention to Mazzy Star and brought its authors to a place where they never wanted to be: neither Sandoval nor Roebuck ever pursued fame – they were indifferent to fame. What’s more, the infamous silent duo didn’t like to perform live or give interviews, and Sandoval refused to talk about her lyrics at all… Looking back at their seminal melody in 2013, the vocalist succinctly told The Guardian: “I think it’s a good song “.
Her colleague David Roebuck, who died in 2020, explained that their only focus has always been on music, not fame or fans:
“We are not so worried about the outside world. Making music is a very internal process that we are involved in. The outside world is not really on our minds in terms of music. We really do it in our own world and for ourselves. For us, music is a separate world … “
In an interview from 2018, one of the founders of the alternative rock band Mazzy Star, Roebuck, told how such a wonderful melody was born:
“Hope and I wrote the music and lyrics in one day. It happened almost simultaneously. We weren’t trying to write a hit – we were just writing a song… I think we had a melody and a feeling and we just followed that feeling. And it ended up being a song… It was an acoustic guitar and we both sang, and after we wrote the song, we arranged it for other instruments – piano, slide guitar and drums. But it all started with an acoustic song…”
If you feel nostalgic anguish for days long gone when you hear “Fade Into You”, Mazzy Star never planned this! Word to David:
“It was never a nostalgic song,” he said. “Unless you really think about nostalgia for real, because it really was for real…”
Summary, the meaning of the “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star
The song is completely about a girl who is deeply in love with a person. This person doesn’t know that she loves him. He is in pain. He is always thinking about his past. He is unable to forget his past and come out of it. The girl is worried that he doesn’t understand her love. She wants him to look at her emotions and how she feels about him. She believes that her love for him will help him come out of his pain.
