Queen’s 13th studio album, May 1989’s The Miracle, has been long overdue for a proper reassessment, and a new eight-disc box set from Hollywood Records dubbed The Miracle Collector’s Edition enables our finely attuned ears to do just that. (See sidebar for a full review.) Content supervisors Kris Fredriksson and Justin Shirley-Smith, along with their Miracle Sessions coproducer Joshua J. Macrae, recently all got on the line with me from across the pond to exclusively confirm how The Miracle box set came to be, and why it clearly lives up to its name. If I could only reach you / That would really be a breakthru…
Mike Mettler: Why was The Miracle chosen as the follow-up box set to [October 1977’s] News of the World that came out in 2017 as opposed to, say, [November 1975’s] A Night at the Opera or [June 1980’s] The Game?
One of the main things that originally drew us to this idea of doing was that it’s, ends. This box set is the continuation of that, really. [The 2018 Oscar-winning biopic essentially tells the Queen story from their early-1970s inception to the band’s triumphant performance at Live Aid in July 1985.]
