The Indie Anthology 65: essential songs

For the next chapter in our anthology we are still under the influence (well, safe guess is that I'll always be) of that "band from Athens, Ga" with mumbled cryptic lyrics and guitar lines from another space and time... But it's a tribute to another underrated music genius: Mr. Mark Mulcahy. College rock, you're gone but you'll never be forgotten...

Song: The Heart is Attached
Artist: Miracle Legion
Year: 1984

Again, it's very easy to know how I got into Miracle Legion back then. Of course I was looking for every other band on the planet with that early 'R.E.M.'s jangly sound, so there's no point on extending myself on these. Instead, allow me to focus on what does it means hearing 'The Backyard' in 2015 and how Mr. Mark Mulcahy songs keeps knocking at my door from time to time, thankfully.

'The Backyard' is one of those records you hear with reverence and some kind of fear, worried by the possibility the magic, the connection with the six tunes have gone because you are now an older, wiser, uninnocent, sadder person. But it never happens. It's a trip to familiar places, from the first guitar line and chord change of Ray Neal. From the title track and Mark delivering the killer line "The world was so big and I was so small", saying everything with so little, to the high-energy of  "Closer to the Wall" to my favourite, 'The Heart Is Attached', with its ups & downs, the bright and gloom altogether, this stories of young & old still ring true through my ears, still go close to my heart.  

Funnily enough, I never got myself into Polaris or Mulcahy's solo work, kind of losing track of his career... until my "other band", The National, delivered an astounding version of 'Ashamed of the Story I Told' in 2009, for the lovely tribute album 'Ciao My Shining Star', warning me there was a lot of music awaiting me to hear. The second coming of Mulcahy in my life. See? Always around...