is understandable". Instead of a cover painting and hand-lettering by John 'Patrick' Byrne, who had illustrated every previous Rafferty and Stealers Wheel album, Sleepwalking featured a simple, stark photograph of an empty road stretching to the sky. There was change too in the songs. The deeply introspective lyrics of Sleepwalking suggest Rafferty found success far from glamorous: tracks like "Standing at the Gates", "Change of Heart", and "The Right Moment" suggest the singer was exhausted, burnt-out, and desperately seeking a new direction – and continued his long-running theme of alienation. Liner notes for the compilation album Right Down the Line (prepared with Rafferty's close co-operation) confirmed this several years later, noting the singer was now "finding himself at the crossroads and looking to replace the treadmill with a new dimension in his life". Rafferty sang the Mark Knopfler-penned song "The Way It Always Starts" (1983) on the soundtrack of the film Local Hero. Also in 1983, Rafferty announced his intention to take a break and devote more time to his family: "It dawned on me that since Baker Street I had been touring the world, travelling everywhere and seeing nowhere. Whatever I do in the future, it's at my own pace, on my own terms." Based at 16th-century Tye Farm in Hartfield, near the Kent-Sussex border, Rafferty installed electric gates to protect his privacy, built a recording studio, and worked largely by himself or with Murphy. In 1987, Rafferty and Murphy co-produced The Proclaimers first UK hit single "Letter from America". According to his former wife Carla, who discouraged visitors: "He was just stalling for time. Maybe some new project would suddenly happen, but I knew he'd crossed the line as far as the record business went." His next album, North and South, was released in 1988. In an interview that year with Colin Irwin to promote the album, Rafferty mentioned that he was interested in doing more production work and writing film soundtracks, and even floated the idea of writing a musical about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Reviews of the album were mixed. In The Times, critic David Sinclair was particularly scathing: "On North and South, it sounds as if he has thumbed a lift up the road to a mock-Texan bar somewhere in his native Scotland. There is a mid-Atlantic blandness lurking behind the rococo roots veneer." In the early 1990s, Rafferty recorded a cover version