Archives for November 2021

Certain Songs #2231: Sinéad O’Connor – “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”

November 24, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1990

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Out of all of the emotionally devastating songs on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got — “Feel So Different,” “Three Babies,” “Nothing Compares 2U,” “Black Boys on Mopeds” — perhaps the most emotionally devastatingist was the penultimate song, “Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” which unlike most of the other songs, splits the difference between quiet acoustic dirge and big rock song.

Certain Songs #2230: Sinéad O’Connor – “Three Babies”

November 23, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1990

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On the short list of Prettiest Songs Ever Recorded, Irish Chanteuse Division, “Three Babies” is not a song that you would expect me to love, on paper. After all, it’s a string-laden requiem about the three miscarriages she’d had, so I shouldn’t relate to it in any way, shape, or form.

Certain Songs #2229: Sinéad O’Connor – “I Am Stretched on Your Grave”

November 22, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1990

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It turns out that 30 years later, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got is one of my all-time favorite albums. I mean, it wasn’t like I underrated it at the time — I’d always put it as my second-favorite album of 1990, just after the Pixies Bossanova album, but I’ve realized that I love it even more than that record.

And so, while we’ve focused on the singles that preceded it — “Jump in the River” and “Nothing Compares 2U,” it’s time to do a few songs from the album proper, like the second track, “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” which combines two totally disparate forms of music into something totally new under the sun.

Certain Songs #2228: Sinéad O’Connor – “Nothing Compares 2U”

November 19, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1990

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It goes to just how great of an album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got actually is that its undeniable, world-conquering single is actually like my fifth or sixth favorite song on the record.

And it’s a tough one to write about: because 30 years later, “Nothing Compares 2U” is a basically a standard, so much of a standard that from the moment that it became a massive hit, Prince — who wrote the song, just in case you didn’t know that — basically tried to steal it back. To no avail, I might add.

Certain Songs #2227: Sinéad O’Connor – “Jump in the River”

November 18, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1988

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I almost put Married to The Mob Soundtrack as the album where to find “Jump in the River,” because that soundtrack — to a Jonathan Demme film starring Michelle Pfeiffer & Matthew Modine — was the first place I ever heard it, almost two years before it turned up on the back half of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got

In fact, Sinéad O’Connor’s “Jump in the River” led off that soundtrack, which was closed by Brian Eno’s utterly transcendent take on “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” which if you’ve never heard, you need to hear it right this second.

Certain Songs #2226: Sinéad O’Connor – “Mandinka”

November 17, 2021 by Jim Connelly Leave a Comment

Album: The Lion and The Cobra
Year: 1987

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Sinéad O’Connor’s debut album, The Lion and The Cobra, had a long and difficult gestation period. And not just because she got pregnant by her drummer, John Reynolds, during the recording of it, freaking up her record company.

The problem was that she hated the sound her producer was getting, and ended up firing him after six months, meaning that somewhere there are alternate versions of these songs that you are never going to hear. And so, Sinéad took up the production reins herself, and while it came out a year after she started it, The Lion and The Cobra was exactly the album she wanted.

Certain Songs #2225: Sinéad O’Connor ft. The Edge – “Heroine”

November 16, 2021 by Jim Connelly 1 Comment

Album: Captive Soundtrack
Year: 1986

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Was I such a big U2 fan in the mid-1980s that I would spend money on a movie soundtrack for a film I never saw just because it doubled as his solo debut? Duh.

According to its Wikipedia page, Captive is “a 1986 Anglo-French cinema film loosely based on the experiences of Patty Hearst.”

Certain Songs #2224: The Simpsons – “Stop The Planet of the Apes. I Want to Get Off!”

November 10, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Songs in the Key of Springfield
Year: 1996

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Hi, I’m Jim Connelly. You may remember me from such Certain Songs posts as “#1224: Mystery Science Theatre – “Love Song From Mystery Science 3000” or “#1723: R.E.M. – “It’s The End of The World (and I Feel Fine)”

In a fantastic Vulture oral history of this episode — Episode 19 of Season 7: “A Fish Called Selma” — we find out that the writers had decided to do a Troy McClure showcase, pairing him up with one Marge’s sisters, Selma.

Certain Songs #2223: The Simpsons – “The Amendment Song”

November 9, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Songs in the Key of Springfield
Year: 1996

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“The Amendment Song” showed up in episode 18 of the 7th season of The Simpsons. For reasons too convoluted to get into, the studio making the Itchy & Scratchy Show cartoons has been shut down — thus the episode title, “The Day The Violence Died” — and Krusty the Clown is forced to play a cartoon that “makes learning fun:” all about how our Constitution gets amended.

Certain Songs #2222: The Simpsons – “The Monorail Song”

November 8, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Songs in the Key of Springfield
Year: 1993

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The first time a character on an episode of The Simpsons broke into song is lost to the mists of history (i.e., I’m too lazy to look it up and figure it out because I want to create the illusion that The Simpsons has always existed and will always exist, which to anyone younger than 30 is actually true), but musical comedy has always been in its DNA, and so I’m going to focus on three songs, all from the golden age of the mid-1990s, when The Simpsons was perhaps the greatest piece of comedy this country — or any country — has ever produced, and all collected on 1997’s Songs in the Key of Springfield.