Arriving in the midst of a trans-Atlantic vanguard of pre-Lilith Fair, solo female singer-songwriters - including Tracy Chapman, Toni Childs and Edie Brickell - in the late 1980s, Tanita Tikaram bewitched my MTV-addled brain with the shadowy video of her debut single "Twist in My Sobriety" in 1988. Still, of all those "proto-Liliths", for whom the unabashed bitchery and unpoetic sexual frankness which became fashionable in the mid-90s was trumped by a more earthy, organic exoticism (be it the laid-back flower child naivete of Brickell, the recklessly rage-ful power of Childs, or the inner-city verite of Chapman), all of whom have struggled mightily since their explosive debuts to sustain viable, respectable careers in the ruthlessly fickle music biz, none of their early successes feels more fluke-ish 20 years on than that of Tanita Tikaram's Ancient Heart.

Perhaps, it was just the thrill of hearing an entrancingly beautiful, dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman singing look, my eyes are just holograms in the deep, breathy voice of an ancient cave goddess, a voice of twisted driftwood, a voice soft, dark, warm, and nourishing as peat moss, a voice that suggested a soul many millennia older than this Malaysian-Fijian-British girl's mere 19 years - over production (by former Zombie Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke) that was equal parts folk and pop, mostly acoustic instrumentation that, be it the lounge-jazz trumpet of "For All These Years", an oboe's haunting commentary in the chorus of "Twist in My Sobriety", the creamy summer-haze basslines of "He Likes the Sun", or the sweet, delicate guitar lines that open the startlingly brief, tearjerking "Cathedral Song", felt like some beautiful, handwoven fabric indigenous to some long lost island culture. Ancient Heart remains a record of astonishing beauty. And nearly everything Tikaram has released since has been depressingly - sometimes even embarrassingly - tepid. Very sad.

But at least we have this: The familiar, easy-going swing of the album-opening "Good Tradition", its folk festival combo of a horn section and mandolins. The devastating admission of futility at the heart of the ghostly-spare "I Love You", with its gently plucked guitar harmonies - understated, but insistently percussive, like the tapping of autumn brances against the window in a room gone silent with mourning. The expansive, jazzy languor of "For All These Years". The lilting piano lines that underline the distance and yearning - I want to see you again - of "Valentine Heart". That sudden, furious break in the middle of "He Likes the Sun", jerking us out of our hammocks, waking us up from our lazy reveries, and then suddenly, giving us back up, laying us back down - you just lie, lie low, lie low for me. The way, over slowly cascading drums, and the repeated strikings of a single brittle guitar chord, her voice turns into the howl of an old tree's limbs - unless it's all alone - against the merciless gusts of a rainy spring Sunday in "Preyed Upon", her certain, measured pleas for time, to complicate you, to make you hate the things you might've done, prayerful, and perilously seductive.

Ancient Heart, like an ancient ruin, is an album that invites us into itself as pilgrims or archaeologists; the pleasures it offers are steeped in discovery. While songs like "World Outside Your Window" and "Cathedral Song" boast conventionally catchy tunes, and assimilate well into the greater pop landscape, they are only the entry points - the things that lure us to keep digging as we continually discover fragments of a lost city, society, culture, world, almost entirely of Tikaram's creation. Tanita Tikaram has recorded a half dozen records in the nearly-twenty years since Ancient Heart cast it's deathly romantic pall over kids like me still recovering from their Duran Duran obsessions. But each new record seems to provide further evidence that she's merely a shadow of the artist she was as 19. Lucky for us, though. It gives us all the more time to brush the sand off the treasures buried here, all the more time to discover it again and again in the constantly shifting lights of life and experience. One of the great, unsung masterpieces of the 80s.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Ancient Heart" by Tanita Tikaram
Reprise Records
Released 1988

Produced by Peter Van Hooke and Rod Argent
44 min.

SONGS: Good Tradition - Cathedral Song - Sighing Innocents - I Love You - World Outside Your Window - For All These Years - Twist in My Sobriety - Poor Cow - He Likes the Sun - Valentine Heart - Preyed Upon

Recommended: Yes