Album: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Year: 1988
. . .
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.
Starting off with a pistol shot and driver by overdriven crunchy guitar played by Sinéad herself — and bass by Andy Rourke, late of the Smiths — “Jump in the River” is probably the closest thing to traditional indie rock that Sinéad ever recorded, right down to the slightly languid pace and the sexually obsessed lyrics.
There’s been days like this before you know
And I liked it all
Like the times we did it so hard
There was blood on the wall
It’s also unique in that she’s mixed really really low, way down in the middle of the lyrics, which is exacerbated by the fact that she’s singing in her indoor voice: “Jump in the River” doesn’t really indulge in any of the vocal pyrotechnics that were all over The Lion and The Cobra. Even her “oooh-oooooohhs” during the coda are relatively subdued.
But all of that actually adds to the tension of “Jump in the River” — you keep waiting for it to break its stride, to sway from its path, but like the river, it doesn’t. Of course, it also helps that it has a simple and hooky chorus.
And if you said jump in the river I would
Because it would probably be a good idea
And if you said jump in the river I would
Because it would probably be a good idea
We never find out if she was ever actually asked to jump into the river, only that she’s so enraptured that she probably would.
As a single, “Jump in the River” didn’t do quite as well as “Mandinka,” except on the U.S. alternative charts, where it made it to #17, meaning that she’d made inroads with both the U.S. alt crowd and the U.S. dance crowd in 1988, which definitely had some overlap, of course. All of it meant that if she could get an album out in 1989 with all of this fresh in people’s minds, she might make even deeper inroads into the charts.
“Jump in the River”
“Jump in the River” Official Video
“Jump in the River” live at Pinkpop, 1988
“Jump in the River” live in Brussels 1990
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