I have a pretty solid memory when it comes to chronology of the favorite music from my initial college radio days, but I’ll admit that I sometimes get it a little jumbled up. For example, I’m long assumed that Miracle Legion’s sophomore full length, Me and Mr. Ray, came out before I ever showed up at the station. I thought it was one of those hidden treasures that I somehow stumbled upon while scanning the music library during one of my late night shifts (or, more likely, was told about it by one of my station elders) and returned to frequently, in part, because it was a means of capturing a part of the station history that I had just barely missed. Instead, every interweb source tells me that the album was released in 1989, so during the year that I was decidedly immersed in the station’s operations, especially when it came to music. Hell, it’s possible I was the one that scratched out a two sentence review on the sticker affixed to the album’s front cover.

My inner reality already askew, I also usually think of the Me and Mr. Ray as the end of the Miracle Legion story, even though I well know better. Three years later–so still within my tenure at the radio station–the band released their follow-up, Drenched. While the predecessor had the distinction of being recorded at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios, Drenched was notable as the band’s bow with relatively new label Morgan Creek Records, which, by its strong association with Polydor, was essentially a major. An offshoot of the movie studio when they were flush with a little too much cash after the atrocious hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the label largely existed to release soundtrack records but spent some time in the early nineties experimenting with bands. Miracle Legion was one of those groups, and Drenched could reasonable be seen at their shot at the big time, or at least the medium time.

That ascendency didn’t really happen, and the Miracle Legion part of my memory banks apparently short-circuited (probably due to some spilled Point beer in that area), I can’t even say for certain whether or not Drenched did well at our station, even with at least one person fully primed and excited for a new album from the band. I do know that certain songs from the record hit my ears like beloved old friends. I may not be able to place the specific associations for a song like “So Good,” but it clearly falls into place with me. I find myself helplessly singing along with the refrain “And every day must I wait on you hand and foot” in the same way that most tried and true singles of that era will set my head bobbing. All that evidence at hand tells me this was one of my songs.

Memory fully aside, some cursory research indicates that Drenched really was about it for Miracle Legion. There’s at least one other self-released album later in the nineties and the various band members cropped up across a batch of different projects across the years, perhaps most notably as part of the band Polaris, best known for penning and performing the theme song for the Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete and Pete. It’s a pretty cool song, and yet another reason for my silly brain to remember that Miracle Legion was more than one album.

Miracle Legion, “So Good”

(Disclaimer: That cursory research thing I mentioned before applies to my efforts to figure out if Drenched, or really much of the Miracle Legion catalog is still it print. It looks like it’s not, at least not in a way that would allow an enterprising music fan to head to their favorite local, independently-owned record store and order the release, and therefore the song it contains, in way that compensates both the proprietor of the said store and the artist. The band’s first full-length can be ordered online in a way that I suspect puts the bulk of the money in the various band members’ pockets, right where it belongs. Regardless, the song above is posted with no intention to perpetrate theft against the artist and I will gladly remove it is contacted by someone with due authority to make such a request who is indeed making that request.)