Miracle Legion were a Connecticut-based band that immediately sprang to life on the heels of a post-R.E.M. guitar rock boom, chiefly because lead singer Mark Mulcahy's voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Michael Stipe's, and the arpeggio guitar structures were akin to Peter Buck's. But the band -- Ray Neal (guitar), Jeff Wiederschall (drums), and Steven West (bass), and later just Mulcahy and Neal -- ultimately became unique in its own right. The Backyard EP, released by the small Incas Records label in 1984, was an immediate college radio hit, and the band rode high on its popularity for some time. It took until 1987 to get Surprise Surprise Surprise out on Rough Trade, and they were unable to capitalize on the initial buzz; the tone was no longer so sprightly. The follow-up, 1988's Glad, was a collection of originals and some live tracks recorded with Pere Ubu. By 1989, Mulcahy and Neal were working as a duo and released a savvy acoustic album titled Me and Mr. Ray on Rough Trade. Having abandoned the R.E.M. sound, the band found its own direction as a country-rock duo. Drenched arrived in 1992, followed by Portrait of a Damaged Family in 1997, the latter of which was released on Mulcahy's own Mezzotint Records. In 1999 Mulcahy released a solo album, Fathering, as well as music for Nickelodeon's The Adventures of Pete & Pete. He continued to record solo into the 2000s, putting out the I Just Shot Myself in the Foot Again EP (2000) and the full-lengths Smilesunset (2001) and In Pursuit of Your Happiness (2005). All hail the greatest indie-rock band that should have been: The mighty, mythic Miracle Legion are back. If you missed them the first time around, well, it’s not entirely your fault. They emerged from New Haven in 1984 with “The Backyard,” the kind of side-one, track-one jangle-pop perfection most bands spend a lifetime hoping to perfect. They followed that with four near-perfect full-lengths, EPs with Pere Ubu and the Sugarcubes, and, oh, and the kind of bad luck people write a lifetime of country songs about. Some reunions are victory laps, like the Replacements bashing their anthemic odes of beautiful losers and lost youth to aged festival-goers, or the Pixies’ triumphant, decade-long re-embrace of their influential barbed-wire surf-punk. Other bands such as Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine and Mission of Burma, have gotten back together to expand already significant legacies with ground-breaking new material. But the return of Miracle Legion this summer is something different. This is no nostalgia act. This is a second chance for everyone. “It’s precious to me,” says singer Mark Mulcahy, “and I couldn’t bear it to be less than it was. This band had its own world of intense presentation and magic.” First and most excitingly, it’s an opportunity for the rest of the world to catch up with one of the most captivating and essential catalogs of the 1980s and 1990s, to discover songs so heart-warming, melodic and transcendent they affected the lives of all who heard them. You don’t have to believe me. Ask Thom Yorke. "When I was 15, ‘Surprise Surprise Surprise’ changed the way I thought about songs and singing,” says Radiohead’s Yorke, of Miracle Legion’s 1987 full-length debut. “Mark Mulcahy’s was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.” Prince was such a fan that he invited the band to spend three months at his Paisley Park studio in hopes of hearing new material. Nick Hornby devoted an entire chapter of “Songbook” to Mulcahy’s voice, which he said “manages to convey and earned optimism and compassion through the filters of truth.” When the BBC rediscovered “The Backyard” and named it a recent song of the day, the famed Andy Kershaw praised their “unsung genius,” a “series of fabulous albums,” and noted that they “should have been as big as R.E.M., for whom they were a match in talent and material.” Kershaw was spot-on: As Yorke, Prince and a generation of musicians knew, Mulcahy and Mr. Ray Neal were every bit the tandem of Morrissey-Marr, of Stipe-Berry-Buck-Mills, of Mould-Hart-Norton, of Gordon-Moore-Ranaldo. “Surprise Surprise Surprise” (1987), the acoustic “Me and Mr Ray” (1989) and “Drenched” (1992) are iconic albums of the college-radio era, matched only by the frenetic power and passion of the band’s explosive live performances. Mr. Ray is the unsung guitar genius of the decade. As for Mulcahy, his quivering, expressive voice: “If he began as a tenor with a nice twang (despite his Connecticut roots),” wrote the novelist Rick Moody, “his voice soon grew to include the improvisatory unpredictability of Van Morrison, the poetical ambition of Patti Smith, and the gift with melisma that you hear only in jazz singers.” Still not with me on the band’s impact and influence? Well, when Mulcahy’s wife died unexpectedly, leaving him with young twin daughters, the musicians who stepped forward to play his songs on a surprise benefit album included a who’s who of three-decades of indie-rock royalty: Michael Stipe, Thom Yorke, Black Francis, The National, Dinosaur Jr., Syd Straw, the New Pornographers’ Carl Newman, Mercury Rev, Juliana Hatfield, plus members of Wilco and the Fountains of Wayne. That level of acclaim and love might seem positively charmed – and it might make you wonder why this richly influential band never broke wider than a beloved, devoted cult. If their music is poignant and life-affirming, the Miracle Legion “Behind The Music” is a story of frustration, backstage music-industry double-dealings, and every crummy break imaginable “You look at it on paper – we met this guy and played with these guys – and it was great,” says Mulcahy, “But to actually live it, there was a lot of disappointment. There was so much blind optimism! I saw all the good things as a break. When you add it all up, it looks like a band that could not find the easy part of the stream.” A British label offered them a million pounds to sign off “The Backyard” alone. That deal didn’t happen, but sucked away two years of momentum while it lingered on the table. Geoff Travis of Rough Trade charmed the band by showing up at their New York hotel room with advance cassettes of The Smiths’ “Strangeways Here We Come.” They signed to Rough Trade for “Surprise” and 1989’s acoustic “Me and Mr. Ray,” snuck the heart-wrenching single “You’re the One Lee” into rotation on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” only to be stranded on-the-verge again when Rough Trade America was thrown into bankruptcy. Hope arrived when they signed to a new label called Morgan Creek, which was flush with cash from releasing the “Robin Hood” soundtrack that included the record-breaking No. 1 Bryan Adams hit “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You.” They enlisted John Porter, of Smiths and Roxy Music fame, to produce 1991’s knockout “Drenched.” That led to a March 1992 national television appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman,” back in the day when Letterman and “SNL” were the career-defining, only-games-in-town. Trouble is, they were not the only game in town that night – college basketball ran way into overtime, pushing Miracle Legion’s one shining moment to nearly 2:30 a.m. Then, the day before the band was going to fly to New Orleans to begin recording the follow-up to “Drenched” with Daniel Lanois, Mulcahy’s phone rang. It was Morgan Creek, saying they were putting things on hold for awhile. How long? They didn’t really know. “On hold? We leave tomorrow,” Mulcahy remembers telling the label. “I was in the kitchen with the band, everyone’s looking at me. I had to say it’s on hold. OK. Two years later, nothing. We’re on hold. It was just dying. We fizzled out that way.” They didn’t hear much from the label again after that – until Rough Trade bankruptcy proceedings began, and a Morgan Creek executive decided to bid against the band for their back catalog. They won, and stranded should-be classics “The Backyard,” “Glad,” “Me and Mr Ray” and “Surprise Surprise Surprise” out of print and in evil legal limbo ever since. “At least for me, the end of the band was a progressive grinding down of our will,” says Neal. “I don't think I felt it was over. It was just exhaustion!” Neal got married, started a family and ultimately moved to Scotland. The rhythm section of Dave McCaffrey and Scott Boutier found work playing with Frank Black after the Pixies fell apart. Mulcahy got offered the chance to record the music for a show called “The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” long before anyone knew it too would have a cult life of its own. Miracle Legion had the songs for a follow-up to “Drenched” ready to go when Morgan Creek put everything on hold; those songs became “Portrait of a Damaged Family,” which was released quietly in 1996 as the first CD on Mulcahy’s own label, Mezzotint. The band played a handful of shows, and then no one saw the point anymore. “It fell apart in a natural way,” Mulcahy says. “There wasn’t an announcement to be made. We were so bled by the legalness of it all.” And that’s why this second run is a second chance for the band, too. Seem unlikely? Well, Mulcahy has been on the kind of mid-career roll artists only dream of. His third solo album (and first in eight years), “I Love You Mark J. Mulcahy,” was called the best album of 2013 by Salon and earned him an audience with “Fresh Air” queen Terry Gross and a spot in Lincoln Center’s prestigious American Songbook series. Then Polaris, the band that Mulcahy launched almost casually, as Miracle Legion slowly faded out, had the kind of magical rediscovery Miracle Legion hopes for now. The creators of the Nickelodeon kids show “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” were fans, and recognized the perfect soundtrack for their show about love and longing, inside the poignancy and warmth of Miracle Legion’s music. Neal, burned out, decided not to do the show, which ran from 1993-96. That left Mulcahy, McCaffrey and Boutier as the band that lived only in your TV, that was unseen on the show itself save for the opening credits, which never performed live, and whose music was unavailable (until Mezzotint did a 20XX reissue) outside of a cereal box mail-in. But as the show achieved cult-classic status, obsessives also demanded Polaris. When a sold-out Los Angeles “Pete and Pete” fan fest in 2012 sang along with every word of songs that had never been played before outside basic cable, Mulcahy, McCaffrey and Boutier decided to give the people what they wanted and sold-out shows followed up and down the East and West Coasts. Inevitably, they filled out the set with a handful of Miracle Legion songs, by demand of fans of both bands, but also because it was muscle memory, after all these years, after hundreds of shows. “We did Polaris,” says Mulcahy, “and I was well-surprised.” Something was missing, however. Mulcahy, a forward-looking guy who sometimes wanted to put distance between himself and the past after years of having the annoying “former Miracle Legion singer” tag follow him around, found surprising joy in the old songs. They still belonged to him – but they also belonged to Neal. On stage, Boutier and McCaffrey were locked-in like veteran jazz players; they knew intuitively where the others would go next. Nevertheless, Mulcahy yearned to hear the missing guitar parts. He wanted to play with his friend Mr Ray again. “When I play these songs without Ray,” Mulcahy says, “they just don’t sound right.” “I definitely missed it,” says Neal, who moved to Scotland and took a step back from music. “A lot of other things, both good and bad occupied my time, but I never stopped thinking about making music. I've always felt we had more to do, but didn't know when or how. Everything has just seemed to come together.” “Portrait” brought everyone back together again. 2016 marks its 20th anniversary, and the 20th birthday for Mezzotint, so plans began to reissue the album on vinyl on Record Store Day. From there, it was a short putt to the idea of a handful of shows to mark the occasion. “Based on what I’ve seen my friends do,” says Mulcahy, referring to Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies, “I wish we had done it before.” Both Mulcahy and Neal sound open to new music and to keeping the door open to future possibilities, reissues, and shows beyond this summer run. “Definitely,” says Neal. “I think the one thing I took from other reunions is that I didn't want us to be a nostalgia act. I would only be interested if we had something more to offer. It's really one step at a time, of course.” But Neal, says Mulcahy, “he plays those songs the way I know them. I can’t hear those songs without him. I want to get back to hearing it that way. To play the songs I have a lot of affection for, with guys I have a lot of affection for – to get another chance at the feeling of walking out on stage with those guys…” says Mulcahy. “I love the music and I’m happy to play it the right way: me and Ray abd Scott and Dave. But it’s like a box under the tree, you don’t know what’s in it.” That’s the feeling Neal can’t wait to have again too. “It’s that perfect night when the band and the audience are in just the right place,” he says, “and you feel like you never want it to stop.” Who knows? This time, it might not stop at all. - Dave Daley