I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

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

November 24, 2021 by Jim Connelly

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

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

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

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

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.