Don't Stop Believin': 5 Songs From the Long Road to Recognition
This week's songs are from Miracle Legion, Karen Dalton, the Clean, the Sound, and Charles Bradley
In 2019, my drum set was evicted from its free storage space. I hadn’t played them since the band I played in post-college dissolved after everyone moved away except me. It had been a good six or seven years; they were gathering dust and with two young kids in a three-bedroom condo, I had nowhere to put them. So I decided to sell them for cheap on Craigslist. The guy who bought them from me was in his early 40s and had just moved back from Europe. He was looking for gear to set up in his garage and start playing again with some of his old friends. He handed me the cash, looked down at the drums sitting the garage, over at his car idling with the trunk open in the alley, and then back at me.
“Are you sure?” he said.
I was.
Then he asked again.
I think about this exchange from time to time. Not because I have any regrets, but because he read the situation. It was familiar territory for him, and he was considerate about reaping the benefits of someone else officially giving up on a dream (however far-fetched it may have been).
Calling it a “dream” cheapens it, though. There is no end goal, fantasy, or reward in mind—or even any self-delusion that I was any good or had any chance at success. More accurately, it is a compulsion to engage with and participate in something I really love, if only for the satisfaction and enjoyment that comes from doing it. It’s what got me doing this. And it’s part of the reason that within a year of selling that drum set I bought a guitar and started teaching myself to play (the other part was COVID lockdowns).
Music history is littered with better-late-than never stories. Success stories from people who either never gave up, or were brought out from obscurity years after their prime. Muddy Waters and other Delta Blues musicians had taken on other jobs before hip English kids showed interest in the blues. Promoters pulled together aging has-beens and gave their music careers a second life as superstars, and now legends. As streaming video surged in the early 2010s, platforms in need of content to fill libraries carried a number of music documentaries that revived faded and forgotten careers (Searching for Sugarman), chronicled the unlucky—and almost inept—lifers who never gave up on their dreams (Anvil: the Story of Anvil), shared the stories of late-blooming, but incredibly talented performers (Charles Bradley: Soul of America), or shared the discovery of incredibly innovative, but previously unheard of revelations (A Band Called Death). True talent and artistry will find its audience. And these stories are worth telling. What better lesson than to keep doing what you love for no other reason than you love to do it.
Here are 5 songs from artists that had a long road to recognition.
“I like everything about music except the music business.” - Mark Mulcahy
Miracle Legion - “All for the Best”
If I were to explain the Nickelodeon show Pete & Pete to someone who’d never heard of it today, no one would believe me. Two tween red-headed brothers are both named Pete. One has a tattoo of a scantily-clad woman you’d expect to see on the bow of a ship and is friends with a skinny, bespectacled man in pajamas who refers to himself in the third person as “Artie: the strongest man in the world.” They run around suburbia, have bizarre adventures, and everyone from Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry to Frank Gifford and Patty Hearst guest starred on the show. In the early internet days, it took me years of searching to find details on and music from Polaris, the band that performed the show’s catchy theme song and other songs from the show.
Cut to 2009 and Thom Yorke releases “All For the Best” as a single. It’s a cover from a little-remembered 80s band called Miracle Legion. Intertwined with the lyrics referencing brothers, Yorke’s brother sings harmonies with him. The two were apparently huge Miracle Legion fans in the mid-80s. It’s also part of a benefit album full of incredible artists performing the songs of Mark Mulcahy who tragically lost his wife and was now raising 3 year old twins. Mulcahy is the lead singer for Miracle Legion as well as Polaris, which explains the roundabout story. Yorke’s version, which is very good and totally different than the original, helped revive interest in Mulcahy and Miracle Legion, which led to a brief reunion tour in the middle of the last decade.
“All For the Best” sounds like if Joy Division recruited Michael Stipe to replace Ian Curtis. There is that metallic, rounded and melodic bass, echoing drums and a sharp rigid guitar cutting through the steady rumbles. Like Joy Division, you might consider dancing to it if the vocal melody wasn’t so melancholy and the lyrics so sad. Do yourself a favor and check out Mulcahy’s “Hey Self-Defeater” as well.
Karen Dalton - “Something on Your Mind”
In Chronicles: vol. 1 Bob Dylan said Karen Dalton was his favorite singer among the early 60s Greenwich Village folk scene. “She sang like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed,” he was known to accompany her with his harmonica from time to time. Dalton only recorded two albums, It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best (1969) and In My Own Time (1971). Dylan’s high compliment hit around the same time bands like the Mold Peaches and Devendra Banhart drew new interest in more esoteric edges of folk music to draw new interest in Dalton’s music. Her recordings include some contemporary (at the time) pop songs like “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Reason to Believe” as well as iconic blues like “It Hurts Me Too.” Across them all, you hear Dalton’s unique voice—a little raspy, and like Billie Holiday’s, a little slow against the beat, and in no hurry to catch up. Joanna Newsom, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, and Courtney Barnett are among those who have called Dalton’s music a key source of inspiration, likely catching on to her music in that second wave of interest. Dalton passed away in 1993 following years of substance abuse issues. Given she was indifferent to attention or fame when she was alive, were she to live long enough, she might have been just as dismissive of the revived interest in her music.
“Something on Your Mind” is her best-known song, and for good reason. There’s that fantastic droning bass and hints of sitar-like slide guitar and strings lightly decorating it all like tinsel on a Christmas tree from the leftovers in last year’s box. A conventionally “good” singing voice would render all of this forgettable. But with Dalton’s rasp it is relatable and affectionate. As Nick Cave said about the song, “There is something about human achievement, when it reaches so high in such a casual way—it could do something that is so utterly perfect.”
“Music is a living thing, it really is. You can twist and turn the structure of it while you’re making it and, when you’re with a group of people experiencing that together, there’s a special magic in that. You reach down deep into yourself and pull something up. It’s like nothing else in the world.” - Hamish Kilgour
The Clean - “Anything Could Happen”
Listening to the Clean, they sound like a band on Merge Records in the late 2000s. Catchy melodies, lo-fi production, say no more. But color me surprised to find these recordings aren’t from some band in a rented bungalow in Atlanta, Nashville, or Raleigh-Durham and made on the cheap. Rather, they were recorded during the late 70s in Dunedin, New Zealand. Blindfold test “Tally Ho!” and tell me it’s not the Black Lips.
These Kiwis sound downright prescient, churning out lo-fi garage rock half a world away and 25 years too early. The band had local success, but a few trips to the UK to break through never delivered on the promise. They released music sporadically through the 80s and 90s before word-of-mouth reached Merge Records and the famed indie label released a collection of their music. Revived interest in the band brought about a reunion and new music in 2009 and tours in the early 2010s. With “Anything Could Happen,” the guitar bursts in with a shining optimism in the chord progression, but the vocals—in sound and melody—are there to cut the bullshit. But hang in there, and have a good time. Anything could happen.
“It’s the duty of the artist to go into the darkness and bring something back that’s tangible for people to heal themselves with” - Benjamin Tod
The Sound - “I Can’t Escape Myself”
The Sound received critical acclaim when it emerged from the UK in the early 80s. Their sound was very much in line with other critically acclaimed UK post-punk bands around that time as well. Think Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, or early U2 and The Sound could hang with any of them. Unlike the more commercial-minded instincts of Peter Cook, or Bono, the driving force of The Sound was Adrian Borland, who took the band in a more challenging direction. It was an instinct that would cast a downward trajectory of the band, resulting in its demise in 1988. Borland would go on to form other bands (including The Witch Trials with Jello Biafra) and release a few solo records. Borland, who struggled with mental illness for much of his adult life, lost his fight in 1999 at the age of 41. While commercial success eluded him, Borland’s profile has increased since his death, and people keep discovering his music decades later.
Despite years of interest in the music of the late 70s and early 80s, I’d never heard of The Sound, until a friend with even more interest in that era shared his most recent discovery, which was recommended to him by ChatGPT. We apparently had the same reaction listening to “I Can’t Escape Myself” for the first time (“Holy shit! Where has this been!?”). Musically, it’s closer to Joy Division than U2, but I can’t help but think of how much Borland’s voice sounds like a young Bono, particularly on something like “Winning,” there’s no grandiosity, but the same strain and hunger. There’s the building tension in the bass and drums, with an explosive, brief release. If U2 is all fireworks, The Sound is M-80s thrown at your feet—a lot less pretty, but also a bit more exciting, if not a little more dangerous.
“Life is not an easy journey. Like my mom says, ‘Son, this world is not your home, you’re just passing through.’” - Charles Bradley
Charles Bradley - “Heartache & Pain”
I was at a music festival in 2015 where Charles Bradley was slated to perform before Sturgill Simpson, both slotted for mid-afternoon sets. I wanted to get up close for that, and was happy to see the great Charles Bradley while I waited. We were able to get right up front along the railing. Having seen Charles Bradley: Soul of America and listened to his first record, I knew his story and what we were in for. Bradley was 54 years old before he released his first album on Daptone records. He worked odd jobs, and for years was a James Brown impersonator known as Black Velvet. He was a soft spoken, gentle man with a deeply affecting, soulful voice. During his performance, when he hit that crescendo of a wail in “Heartaches & Pain,” I felt that surging feeling when you witnessing something so vulnerable you probably shouldn’t be there. It was incredible and incredibly raw. While James Brown could pantomime fatigue and emotional exhaustion in his famous Cape act, for Bradley it was real every time. His emotional weight was always right there on the surface and he could channel all of it in his singing. You can hear it in “Heartache & Pain.” You can hear it in his transcendent version of Black Sabbath’s “Changes.”
Daptone—the same neo-soul record label that launched the great Sharon Jones—started working with Bradley in the early 2000s. The house band would write music and he would craft lyrics over the top as they played. It’s an interesting dynamic on display in “Heartaches & Pain”, with ascending, bright horns and descending, emotionally raw vocals about struggle and defeat. On the day that he died in 2017, Bradley was scheduled to perform at a Chicago street festival. The promotional posters with his name on it were all over my neighborhood for weeks afterward. He was a headliner.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs: