RIP Sinead O'Connor

"Nothing undoes the work you've done."

All the pain that you have known
All the violence in your soul
All the wrong things you have done
I will take from you when I come
All mistakes made in distress
All your unhappiness
I will take away with my kiss, yes
I will give you tenderness
For, child, I am so glad I found you
Although my arms have always been around you
Sweet bird, although you did not see me
I saw you

• “This Is To Mother You” Sinead O’Connor 1997

Illustration by the great Oliver Jeffers

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Sinead O’Connor didn’t make any sense to me in the 90’s. I had questions.

1. The shallow: Why would someone so beautiful—those gray eyes!—purposefully make themselves (in my opinion, of course) less so by shaving her head?

2. The naive: What was the point of—at what would instantly become the peak and depth of her music career—ripping up a photo of the pope live on Saturday Night Live¹?

3. The willfully ignorant: Isn’t she just another one-hit wonder?

And I left it at that, looked away and went on with my life.

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Had I dug even an inch deeper, I might’ve found:

1. The shaved head was a statement—a reflection of her core values, a rejection of how others perceived her value. In her 2016 New Yorker article, Amanda Petrusich² wrote:

O’Connor later said she’d cut her hair off in response to male record executives who’d been trying to goad her into wearing miniskirts, into appearing more traditionally feminine. She’d grown up believing that it was treacherous to be a woman, she said. To be recognized as beautiful was only ever a liability: “I always had that sense that it was quite important to protect myself, make myself as unattractive as I possibly could.”

2. Ripping up the photo of the pope was a statement too—against abuses within the Catholic Church against kids. In that way, O’Connor was ahead of her time, as the whole shameful list of abuses was still a decade away from coming even partially to light. She spent her life fighting abuse against kids, to the point where she sacrificed her career for it. In the what’s-a-bigger-word-for-backlash that followed her fiery gesture, celebrities like Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra—loyal to the Pope—got super-Christlike and publicly implied that violence ought to be used against O’Connor³. She appeared at a Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden soon after and was booed so roughly and soundly that she left the stage in tears, but not before shouting the same lyrics she’d sung on SNL over the din. Nothing was ever the same for her.

What’s more punk (and more admirable and more Christlike) than using your platform⁴ to speak truth to power, no matter how unpopular it is, no matter the consequences?

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3. As for my 90’s assertion that she was a one-hit wonder? Well, she may have only had one commercial hit, especially after torching her career, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a whole bunch of great songs And, it’s worth noting, that her debut album had sold well internationally before her big sophomore album (and “Nothing Compares 2 U”) ever happened. If I had gone so far as to even listen to a song besides the hit, I may have discovered that. I did not.

Her voice started playing the long-game with my ears when I fell in love with Peter Gabriel’s album Us, of which O’Connor’s singular voice is an indispensable part, even though it only appears on two songs of the ten songs⁵. Replace her vocals with literally any other singer⁶ in the universe and it halves the quality of every song she sang on. Perfect. From the start, on opening track “Come Talk To Me” her voice pushes and challenges and complements and strengthens and electrifies Gabriel’s. Just listen to the little breaks in her voice from 5:20 to 5:30, crescendoing to the desperate way she sings/reaches/soars to the word “how you FEEL.” I get the chills every time. And knowing that she’s gone now, I’m teary just writing this.

And every time she sings on Us, it’s the same. “Blood of Eden” feels like a raw duet between Adam & Eve. She wasn’t just a harmony; she was another point of view —a second narrator—in the song, a universe all her own. If you can’t feel the yearning in her harmonies, you need your emotions (and your ears) checked.

A voice for the ages. Naked and brave. Technically skilled but raw. Capable of a staggering whisper or a hurricane shout (listen to how she sings the word “FIRE” at the 3-minute mark of 1994’s “Fire on Babylon.” It’s so pure.) I once heard my friend Brian Hardy describe a singer he loved to hear by saying, “I believe every word.” That’s how I feel when Sinead O’Connor sings.

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O’Connor struggled with mental illness, openly. Especially in her last decade or two, it was a knockdown drag out. Her candor was almost jarring.

She had attempted suicide. Was diagnosed as bipolar then undiagnosed then told it was all PTSD. Fibromyalgia. BPD. Suicidal ideation exacerbated by losing her dear son Shane to suicide last year. As with the rest of her life, she was an open book, pages scattered about. She was unafraid to get her hands dirty, to show up messy. She aimed to destigmatize mental illness. As with the rest of her life, she dared try to torch the curtains in dark rooms. And, for that, she paid a price.

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It took a good decade after Us before I really dove into O’Connor’s own music, listening to her EP Gospel Oak on the recommendation of my friend Scott Wiley. Surprise: I loved it. I can’t defend why it took me so long to come around⁷. It has my favorite⁸ O’Connor song, “This Is To Mother You.”

I don’t know that you could find a braver artist than Sinead O’Connor, willing to confront sexism and child abuse and, in such a gentle way with the song above, her own childhood trauma. Her own mother was reportedly abusive, which makes the hope and comfort in the lyrics all the more moving. She writes (and sings) like an old soul—full of experience and compassion, hope and realism, the truth of time.

This is to mother you
To comfort you and get you through'
Through when your nights are lonely
Through when your dreams are only blue
This is to mother you

This is to be with you
To hold you and to kiss you, too
For when you need me I will do
What your own mother didn't do
Which is to mother you

I mean, she’s singing to all of us. But she’s singing mostly to herself, right? The way Tom Petty discovered, after the fact, that “Wallflowers” line about “you belong somewhere you feel free” was actually directed at himself.

Goodnight, Sinead. Lay down your heavy heart and let ours carry it now. May you find the peace you never found here. And the mothering you deserved.

1. I watched the performance live, in real time. I remember being utterly baffled and confused, first by the fact that she was just singing a’cappella and then that she was tearing the pope’s photo while saying “Fight The Real Enemy.” I remember the studio audience being silent. No applause. No boos. Just a room sucked of all its air. I had no clue what it was about, much less the defining controversy it instantly sparked.

2. Paul Jacobsen Substack BINGO!

3. The irony of O’Connor using her celebrity platform to speak out for children while Pesci and Sinatra used it to protect abusers and threaten violence against a woman. Madonna at the time, with no irony for a woman who had videos with burning crosses and whose entire public persona was erected on provocation, said: “I think there is a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people.” LOL, Madge!

At least Kris Kristofferson was human:

Kris even wrote a song about her courage, called “Sister Sinead”

4. In her book, she wrote: "Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame."

5. Looking at Gabriel’s album today, I was shocked to find she’s only on two of the songs. She feels like a defining contributor to everything that’s happening. Quite a cameo.

6. Paula Cole, an incredible singer in her own right, sang the O’Connor parts on the subsequent tour (after O’Connor left the tour for personal reasons not unrelated to the dissolution of her relationship with Gabriel and her feelings about it, using a pretty profane term that’s not nearly as poetic as her song about Gabriel, “Thank You For Hearing Me”), documented on a live album and DVD. Cole is fantastic, emotive, wonderful. And still not near, to me, what O’Connor did to the songs.

7. I’m now a bona fide fan, obviously as I’ve written this. I think her body of work stands up. It’s vibrant and curious and pushes. I don’t know that any other artist has quite the specific alchemy of Irish roots and modern music—punk and her beloved blues and pop and protest music and folk and even reggae and hip hop and trip hop—she made. Her final two albums, in an era when many of her 90’s peers are just recycling the hits and cashing in on lucrative reunion tours, still had something to say.

8. And Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt’s favorite too.