Various – A Woman's Heart (Vinyl)

Released in July 1992 on the independent Dara label, which expected to shift maybe 3,000 copies, this collection of twelve tracks from Mary Black, Eleanor McEvoy, Dolores Keane, Sharon Shannon, Frances Black and Maura O'Connell instead sold over 750,000 copies in Ireland and close to a million worldwide, famously keeping Whitney Houston off the Irish number one spot for months. Built around McEvoy's title track, a duet with Mary Black written in a Rathmines bedsit, it caught something in the air of early nineties Ireland and transformed the careers of everyone involved. Beyond the numbers, it's simply a beautiful record: Keane's definitive Caledonia, Shannon's Blackbird and O'Connell's Summerfly among twelve tracks that still land as hard as they did three decades ago.