We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss
Year: 2014
In 2014, Sinéad O’Connor released her 10th studio album, the sardonically titled I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, and not only was it her second focused album in a row, as far as I’m concerned, it was her best album since I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, with some of the best songs she’s ever written, like the harrowing “8 Good Reasons.”
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2234: Sinead O’Connor – “8 Good Reasons”
Album: How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?
Year: 2012
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After the turn of the century, Sinéad O’Connor went in a bunch of different directions: there was the Irish folk album, the rarities album, the reggae album, the collaborations album, the double half-acoustic half-electric album, none of which had any kind of impact on me, though I did like “Big Bunch of Junkie Lies” from the rarities album and her cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” from the half-electric (though if she was going to do a JC Superstar cover, I would have loved for it to be “Everything’s Alright.”)
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2233: Sinéad O’Connor – “The Wolf is Getting Married”
Album: Faith and Courage
Year: 2000
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As much as I loved I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, it was 10 long years before I connected with another Sinéad O’Connor song, much less album. Which, given how personal her music is, I’m perfectly willing to blame on me. That said, there was never any chance I was going to love, much less like the follow-up, Am I Not Your Girl?
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2232: Sinéad O’Connor – “Daddy I’m Fine”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2231: Sinéad O’Connor – “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2230: Sinéad O’Connor – “Three Babies”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2229: Sinéad O’Connor – “I Am Stretched on Your Grave”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2228: Sinéad O’Connor – “Nothing Compares 2U”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2227: Sinéad O’Connor – “Jump in the River”
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.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2226: Sinéad O’Connor – “Mandinka”
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.”
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2225: Sinéad O’Connor ft. The Edge – “Heroine”