“The strange thing is I feel like I’m time traveling,” said Miracle Legion guitarist Ray Neal in an interview on the eve of the band’s first tour together in almost 20 years.
The legendary New Haven band — vocalist Mark Mulcahy, bassist Dave McCaffrey, drummer Scott Boutier and Neal — has reunited and will play the Iron Horse in Northampton Thursday at 7 p.m. Fancy Trash will open. Their international fan base is rejoicing. Get your tickets while you can.
Neal, who now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, first experienced that time-travel sensation a few months ago in New York City, when he and Mulcahy played as a duo, their first show under the Miracle Legion name in decades.
“I looked across the stage at Mark and just the way he was standing playing the harmonica and the feeling of connectedness I felt between us sent me back 20 years in an instant,” Neal said. “The same thing with the band. I had no idea if it would be like starting from scratch. It wasn’t. We seemed to just fall into a groove really quickly.”
Many fans have been there from the band’s beginning, caught under the spell of its first single, “The Backyard,” a 1984 classic of the college rock era. Its chiming guitar and open-hearted vocals had some reviewers at the time comparing them to R.E.M., but Mulcahy and Neal had — and still have — their own unique room-commanding chemistry.
I’ve played with Mulcahy on some of his solo work since 2003, but I first heard of Miracle Legion in college in 1989, when a friend in the dorm room across the hall brought over a cassette of one of its songs. She wanted to learn it and sing it and needed me to decipher the lyrics. I sat with my ear to the speaker — the music had been recorded badly off of the radio, the tape was full of hiss -— and transcribed the words in a notebook as best I could.
The song was “All For the Best.” Its wistful mood cast a strong spell, with a whomping snare drum for a heartbeat and a spiritual edge thanks to Mulcahy’s expressive voice (Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has long sung its praises).
A lot of the band’s music has that mesmerizing soulfulness — “Country Boy,” “You’re the One Lee,” “Sailors and Animals,” “Homer” — and its catalog is filled with great pop songs, like “You’re My Blessing” (the lead-off track to their last album, 1997‘s “Portrait of a Damaged Family,” which got reissued this year on Record Store Day) and the powerful 1992 single “Snacks and Candy,” which deals with some serious subject matter under the bright major chords, breezy groove and “ba ba ba ba ba”s.
The HeadBand — “The Valley’s Heaviest Reggae Dance Future Roots Live Band” — plays Brew Practitioners in Florence Friday at 7 p.m.
Chris Smither is a celebrated folk/blues/Americana singer/songwriter with a long history with the Valley’s Signature Sounds record label (he was recently featured in the documentary about the label, “Behind a Good Song”). Smither appears at the Iron Horse Saturday at 7 p.m.
Shawn Colvin & Steve Earle met at the Iron Horse almost 30 years ago, when the former was invited to open for the latter. In the decades since that fateful night of acoustic radiance, the acclaimed singer/songwriters, each with multiple Grammy awards on their shelves, have finally made an album together — “Colvin & Earle,” released last month and produced by Buddy Miller, featuring co-written originals and choice covers by Emmylou Harris and the Rolling Stones. Their tour will take them to the Calvin Theatre in Northampton Saturday at 8 p.m.
Local acoustic pop duo The Prestons (Liam and Chard, aka BIll Catalde and Rick Murnane) harmonize at Mocha Maya’s in Shelburne Falls Sunday at 2 p.m.
Snail Mail (Sister Polygon recording artists, on tour from Baltimore), Valley bassist/vocalist/one-woman powerhouse Mal Devisa, acoustic folk/punk artist Alexis Hott and Drool (poetic/ambient “feelings, but with screaming”) team up for a quadruple bill at Flywheel in Easthampton Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood knows a good band name when he sees it, so when it came time to do a new solo project away from his main group, he decided to call it Look Park. The full-length debut record, also called “Look Park,” is due out July 22, and Collingwood and friends will soon be heading across the globe for an appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. Look Park plays The Parlor Room Tuesday at 8 p.m.