There are times in each of our lives that are turning points. Some are easily recognized, like the birth of our children, but like most historic events, we don’t usually see turning points coming. Meeting Kim Richey on a rainy night in Seattle in 1988 was a big turning point in her and my life, but neither one of us realized it at the time.

I walked onto Foster & Lloyd’s bus and stood there slack-jawed while Bill Lloyd introduced me to this tall, blonde woman who sang like an angel. I didn’t know then that Kim would blossom into a brilliant singer/songwriter. I didn’t know that she and I would write the number one hit “Nobody Wins” and that people would stop me in airports and tell me how the song had changed their life or saved their marriage. I could not have guessed then that in 1995 Kim Richey would make such a hauntingly wonderful debut record.

Kim’s eclectic life started in rural Ohio and suburban Dayton. She was raised by her mother and grandparents after the death of her father when Kim was just two years old. I have sometimes wondered if the hopefulness mingled with melancholy in Kim’s music began there. Kim’s musical landscape, like most songwriters, started early, but she had an advantage over the rest of us: She had an aunt with a record shop who would let her have the run of the 45’s bin. She says that experience was the beginning of “songs being more influential on my music than personalities.” She can’t mention a single musical mentor, but she sure can mention some cool singles, everything from Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” to Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe In Magic.”

Kim learned to play guitar in high school, but never played or sang much publicly until college, where she met a Kentucky boy named Bill Lloyd and started a band. She sang harmony mostly, and she did it really well. She developed a sense of how melody and harmony work together that still influences her writing and sound. She’ll list a lot of male vocalists as influences vocally, because she could sing harmony with them on the radio as she rolled down the highway, and roll down the highway she did. After the band broke up (they always do), and college was over, Kim lived in Colorado, South America, Boston, Europe, Washington state and, periodically, Nashville (where she swears that she was a cook at the Bluebird cafe when I was playing songwriter nights there in the early 80’s--The Bluebird wasn’t famous yet and neither was I).

In the fall of 1988, Kim decided to move to Nashville and give this singer/songwriter thing a serious try. She dug in, honed her craft and learned how to mine her heart. Her songwriting grew more and more to represent the melding together of personal emotion and clever Nashville craftsmanship, and she gained a reputation as a singer who could interpret a lyric with grace and force and whose harmony was mesmerizing.

I started to realize a few years ago, after hanging out with Kim, sharing many laughs and solving the world’s problems over beer, that sooner or later some label exec would figure out that this woman needed an audience. In walked Mercury Nashville. They recruited Richard Bennett to help Kim Richey shine. His guitar -driven production style (both acoustic and electric) and sparsely tasteful use of mandolin and steel suit Kim’s style and emotion and the voice is never lost. Kim mourns through “You’ll Never Know,” but still plays her cards close to the vest. She pleads through ”That’s Exactly What I Mean,” not weakly, but with hands-on-hips, a woman letting you know where she stands. She laughs about the irony of a new love calling on “Just My Luck,” and when she sings, “I’ll whisper you lullabies” in “Let The Sun Fall Down” you can almost feel her breath against your skin.

You get the feeling Kim believes every word she wrote on the thirteen tracks, but when you corner her about the specifics, Kim is, as usual, cagey, intensely personal and full of laughter. “My songs aren’t always from my own perspective,” she says. “You make a lot up, but parts of your soul and emotions end up hiding there. You hide the personal stuff in a character in a song, hoping no one will figure it out.” She pauses and smiles, “In other words--none of your beeswax!”

Kim calls her debut “a Nashville record,” explaining that the Nashville songwriting community is about bringing “traditional and non-traditional influences together in a creative way.” The best Nashville has to offer has always been about those traditions and transitions, but also heart and soul framed in musical craftsmanship. With her debut album, Kim Richey has gathered the best of Nashville and made it her own.