David Roback, the guitarist and songwriter best known for working alongside singer Hope Sandoval in the group Mazzy Star, has died at the age of 61.
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David Roback, a guitarist and songwriter best known for working alongside singer Hope Sandoval in the group Mazzy Star, has died. The news was confirmed to NPR in a press release from Roback's management sent on Tuesday evening. He was 61. Roback was born in Los Angeles in 1958, the same city where, in his 20s, he would become a central figure of a scene that remains influential. What became known as the"Paisley Underground" was a confederation of musicians and bands — The Dream Syndicate, Green On Red and Roback's own group, Rain Parade, among others — that fused disparate forms of guitar-reliant pop into a sound particularly of its time.
But it was Roback's sonic vision — mysterious, melancholy and intimately intuitive — that would transcend the label and become the most enduring. In Opal, his group with pristine-voiced singer Kendra Smith that began under the name Clay Allison, Roback had begun to develop and iterate on his smoky, psych-acoustic style of songwriting.
Sandoval's voice was not pristine, but distant and whispering, foggy and full — and, it turned out, could bond like a magnet to Roback's songwriting. The connection is clear from the first lines of"Halah," the opening track on Mazzy Star's 1990 debut,: reverb-drenched and cool as a concrete sill, with Roback's acoustic guitar like a lay in the grass. Their music would develop from there, but always maintain a similar posture.
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