A Good Heart

A Good Heart — Feargal Sharkey's Unlikely Transatlantic Moment

The Voice That Wouldn't Stay in One Country

Feargal Sharkey had spent the better part of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the distinctive voice of The Undertones, an Irish punk band from Derry whose affectionate, melodically gifted take on the genre had produced some of the era's most beloved guitar pop. His singing had always been the group's most immediately identifiable quality: a quavering, slightly nasal vibrato that was technically idiosyncratic and yet deeply expressive, the kind of voice that people either loved immediately or found perplexing for a moment before loving. When The Undertones dissolved in 1983, the question of what Sharkey would do with that voice on his own became genuinely interesting.

Maria McKee's Song in Sharkey's Hands

The answer, in 1985, was to record a song written by Maria McKee, then the lead singer of the Los Angeles country-rock group Lone Justice. "A Good Heart" was built on a yearning quality that matched Sharkey's vocal character almost eerily well: the melody reached for something just out of grasp, the lyric described the emotional landscape of longing and imperfect love with a directness that avoided both sentimentality and irony. In the United Kingdom, the record went all the way to number one. In the United States, the pop market proved somewhat less receptive, though the song still made a genuine impression on the Billboard chart.

The production was warm and measured, with a keyboard-driven backdrop that situated the record firmly in the mid-1980s pop mainstream without sacrificing the slightly weathered, emotional quality that Sharkey's voice always brought to a lyric. The result was a record that sounded at once contemporary and somehow timeless, the kind of ballad that radio programmers understood how to slot and audiences found genuinely moving.

The American Chart Run

The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 15, 1986, debuting at 94. It climbed through the chart over the following weeks, reaching its peak of number 74 on April 5, 1986, where it held steady the following week before fading. The run lasted six weeks total. That modest American performance stood in sharp contrast to the song's enormous success in Britain, where it had sat at the summit of the charts. The American pop market of 1986 was processing an enormous volume of quality material, and a solo debut from a former punk singer carried less context there than it did at home.

What the Voice Could Do

The interesting thing about Feargal Sharkey's solo career, viewed from a distance, is how completely the right song could transform his somewhat unusual instrument into an asset of the first order. With The Undertones he had often sounded urgent and slightly uncontrolled, which was perfectly suited to the energy of post-punk pop. On "A Good Heart," with a lyric demanding vulnerability and sustained emotion, those qualities became something more refined. The wobble in the voice, which might in another context seem like a liability, became the exact sonic correlative of emotional exposure. You heard the feeling because you heard the voice working to contain it.

Maria McKee's Legacy in the Record

One of the more interesting footnotes to this record's history is that its author, Maria McKee, never had quite the international breakthrough the song might have predicted for her, despite Lone Justice's genuine critical reputation. Feargal Sharkey's version of her composition remains the way most listeners encountered the song, which is both a testament to his performance and a reminder that the economy of songwriting credits operates by its own logic. The 9.3 million YouTube views on the track belong to both of them. Press play for three minutes that contain, in compact form, most of what a good heart ever has to say about itself.

“A Good Heart” — Feargal Sharkey's singular moment on the 1980s charts.