Maria McKee (1989), the eponymous solo debut of the former Lone Justice lead singer, is an album that Dave discovers during the course of Dead Man Singing, and it’s one that found me while I was a student at around the same time.

Opening track I’ve Forgotten What it Was in You (That Put the Need in Me) sets the tone for the whole album. For one thing, it’s one of three songs with lengthy, bracketed song titles, but more importantly it establishes the template of guitars – acoustic and electric equally to the fore – organ and a steady rhythm section who can take flight at a moment’s notice. McKee’s exceptional voice takes centre stage though, and she was described at the time by NME as 'matching the frail passion of Patsy Cline, the fiery soul of Aretha Franklin and the forceful blues of Janis Joplin'. It’s a great start, quickly followed by the more reflective melancholy of To Miss Someone, but it’s the third track that really catches Dave’s attention.

Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way) starts with a sparse country-tinged rhythm track for the first verse, before Richard Thompson’s unmistakable lead guitar brings the rest of the band crashing in. It’s a moment that shakes Dave to attention in the book, and I can remember it having the same effect on me when I first heard it, delighted to find the great man moonlighting as a session player. Waterboy Steve Wickham’s violin joins the party and the two interweave joyously through the rest of the cathartic song of romantic misery.

Nobody’s Child is a slower tempo, featuring Thompson again, but his finest moment on the album is the quite extraordinary Breathe, a sparse, brooding examination of the intensity of love. I'd go as far as to say that his playing on the track is up there among my favourite examples of his instrumental work, and if you’ve read what I’ve said about Thompson elsewhere, you’ll know just how high that praise is.   

Even without Thompson’s input (and McKee follows Breathe with an achingly vulnerable cover of Thompson’s own Has He Got a Friend For Me), there’s a lot in the album that I think Dave would love, and which I remember loving back at the tail end of the 80s. Can't Pull the Wool Down (Over the Little Lamb's Eyes) is another highlight, as well as completing the trio of bracketed titles. Taking the album as a whole, this was what felt like my music, the stuff that really resonated, staging a last hurrah before being drowned out (at least for a time) by techno, grunge and other genres which never really worked for me. It still sounds great when I listen to it these days.

The year following the release of this album, McKee had a massive number 1 hit single with Show Me Heaven, the theme to the Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder. When she was first approached to record the song, she agreed on the condition that she could rewrite the lyrics, apparently dismissing the original words as ‘appalling’. The producers agreed but only if she could come up with her new words in 24 hours. Her other songwriting brush with fame was in 1985 when Fergal Sharkey had a hit with A Good Heart, a song she wrote after her break-up with Benmont Tench, the keyboard player with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Sharkey’s follow up single, You Little Thief, was written by Tench, supposedly about the same break-up. That sounds like the kind of thing someone should write a novel about.