Hope Sandoval's "Bluebird" of unhappiness

The devil inside

Is there another musician as consistently gauzy and forlorn in intent as Hope Sandoval? Both with her 1990’s band Mazzy Star (the late David Roback was co-writer and partner in crime), and to some extent even moreso as a solo act with her backing band the Warm Inventions, Sandoval is all in on songs of loss and despair. The typical gambit in Sandoval’s work is to place the protagonist at a moment of decision and allow the listener access to the tortured process of weighing the possibilities. What will be? What should I do? Where is the clarity? These are the kinds of questions Sandoval places in our laps, permitting us to play fly on the wall to an often desperate and wrought situation. Though Mazzy Star and Hope Sandoval are often categorized as “slowcore,” there is much more to these moody, dreamlike songs than one might notice at first listen.

The Hope Sandoval song that most often haunts me is “Bluebird,” appearing on her 2009 album Through the Devil Softly. As the album title suggests, a theme of evil permeates this album, most explicitly in “Bluebird” itself. “Is that the devil in your skies? Is that what’s glowing in your eyes? Is it me that wants to leave? Is it me that you should deceive?” Right from the outset “Bluebird” presents a tapestry of likely treachery as well as the possibility that such deceitfulness is born on the wings of an evil infection—something external almost to the two figures in the song itself.

Are these questions answered by the song’s end? No, they are not. By the conclusion of “Bluebird,” Sandoval sings “Let me go, never let me go.” What we have here is not mere ambivalence or indecision but an exploration of the purest feeling of existing on the razor’s edge—will she stay or will she go? Who’s to say? What is more interesting here is the notion that an emotion is as ephemeral as the breath of air suggested by the first line. In Raymond Carver’s well-known short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the protagonist, a cardiologist named Mel, ruminates about lost love: “There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I would like to know?”

The trancelike quality of “Bluebird” itself renders a complete depiction of the insubstantial nature of the emotional landscape. What we think of as permanent can change on a whim, Sandoval’s song indicates. Evil is a real presence here—a disruptive force interrupting the happiness of a pure melding of the hearts. The optic devil is real here, a kind of infection, a disease of the soul, perhaps a manifestation of carelessness or, for instance, a taking for granted the bluebird of happiness (“Is that the devil in your face? Or just a bluebird that left his place?”). Whatever the case may be, Sandoval’s song depicts a dying love on the brink of extinction. Did the devil put the nail in the coffin? Or are we to blame for the emergence of such a force of negation? It’s a mystery left for the listener. You can listen to the song ten times and never come away with an exact answer.

There is a passage in the middle of “Bluebird” that implies that both members of this union are, in a sense, battling a third force—evil, the devil. “I’ll come around your place and sympathize until your day’s gone.” We might think of this as an expression of empathy even in the darkest moments of a love affair gone awry. However, perhaps “sympathize” has more to do with the feeling that they are in this together, as human beings, against the darker force of inhumanity. This possibility gives us a window into “solving” evil, Sandoval implies. If we connect fully and empathetically as humans, evil may not have a chance to take root. However, the moment is lost. And a ruin is left.