Sinead O'Connor: C/D?

suddenly doesn't seem as strange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIIAQME1Uhg

the photo of the pope being her Mother’s is a detail i never knew & it makes me love her more

also shaving her head when the exec tells her to dress more pretty is VERY much my energy and maybe my entire reason for her being my ride or die for 30+ years

yeah the key part of the prince stuff was this imo

Prince is the type of artist who is hailed as crazy-in-a-good-way, as in, “You’ve got to be crazy to be a musician,” O’Connor said, “but there’s a difference between being crazy and being a violent abuser of women.” Still, the fact that her best-known song was written by this person does not faze her at all. “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “it’s my song.”

Sinead otm

she's just such a beautiful person imo sometimes it's just overwhelming

a queen.

I'm surprised that I haven't said so before itt, but I realised a while back that I'm going to get into A LOT of fights on the internet when she goes.

i will have your back

Sinead is in the comments section of that NYTimes article, chatting away. All her comments are NYT Picks so they are easy to find.

Her first two albums are among my most cherished, just bottomless in their subtleties.

otm

"IT IS NO MEASURE OF HEALTH TO BE WELL ADJUSTED TO A PROFOUNDLY SICK SOCIETY"

this is hard to argue with

frankly a far better take on mental health than just about all the "awareness" raising stuff that's everywhere these days has to offer

Her first two albums are among my most cherished, just bottomless in their subtleties.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, May 19, 2021 10:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, May 19, 2021 11:46 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm. And off the top of my head, I can't think of a better album/career opener than "Jackie."

I just recently dug up I'm Not Bossy (I'm the Boss), after ignoring or maybe not even being aware of it when it came out, and it's good! Not great, but a totally respectable aging-legend album with some legit bangers. Love her.

Agreed. How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? also offers pleasures.

I noted at the time that the multi-tracking of her vocals on I'm Not Bossy was an attempt to mitigate how raspier her vice has become.

lol her voice

I really like this reworking of an older tune (I like the original too):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxH16hEYuuc

this made me go back and listen to Universal Mother last night, which I'd purchased when it was released but otherwise remembered nothing about other than being disappointed at the time (though I did see her live after it came out, the only time I ever saw her). Not sure why, it's a pretty strong album. Not as good as the first two but what is?

"Fire in Babylon" though

jesus christ i had forgotten how devastating most of “i do not want what i haven’t got” is.

i’ve said this before now
you said i was childish and you’ll say it now

not really a fan of those last two albums, she sounds good on them but the songs themselves are just not up to snuff. I like the recent single though.

giving Faith and Courage a first listen ever today

"No Man's Woman" is a jam.

Too much Dave Stewart though

jesus christ i had forgotten how devastating most of “i do not want what i haven’t got” is.
I love, love, LOVE that album. I know it got a lot of attention when it was released - a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning seller that placed a strong second in Pazz & Jop - but it didn't feel like that many people were still listening to it a decade or two later. I think I was introduced to it through Greg Kot - he loved that album, comparing it in some respects to John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. He never had a reason to write about it specifically, he'd just hold it up as a masterpiece whenever he was doing some kind of overview or look back at the '90s for the Tribune. I already knew "Nothing Compares 2 U" but that whole album is amazing - just raw, brave and exposed.

giving Faith and Courage a first listen ever today

"No Man's Woman" is a jam.

I'll have to find it again, but I wasn't happy with the first "best of" they made so I burned my own. The first two albums may be her best, but there's great stuff on pretty much everything up to and including Faith and Courage. (Like Alfred mentioned "No Man's Woman," and "Jealous" and "Daddy I'm Fine" are probably my other two favorites.)

To realize she's ending a major second album with TWO acoustic ballads and an a cappella wonder stroke, my god.

It really shows how incredible her singing and her voice was at that time - it's very tasteful in terms of phrasing, but it never feels too little or restrained because that voice just carries so much in it.

Forgot to mention, if you can, check out her live performances from 1990. I didn't realize how good she was on-stage until I saw a re-run of her first appearance on SNL from September 1990. She doesn't do "Nothing Compares 2 U," she does two other songs from I Do Not Want.... Both are great, especially the second number ("The Last Day of Our Acquaintance") which is a cappella for a large part of it until she hits those chords on her acoustic guitar really hard for the last verse.

Capitol later reissued her first two live videos on a single 95 minute DVD in 2003, newly remastered. The first video (The Value of Ignorance) was from June 3, 1988, and the second (The Year of The Horse) was edited from two shows in late October 1990. If you have a player, it's worth tracking down, but there's both NTSC and PAL versions out there so make sure your player can handle the right one.

You can find VHS rips and probably DVD rips on YouTube if you want to go that route.

I saw her in '90, she was terrific. "Troy" was shattering.

man do I love her guitar on "Jump in the River."

another great interview around the book. I'm deeply disillusioned about Prince's treatment of her. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/may/29/sinead-oconnor-ill-always-be-a-bit-crazy-but-thats-ok-rememberings

She just announced her retirement from recording & touring: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/9583210/sinead-oconnor-retirement

We are coming up to the 20th anniversary of her first retirement.

🎵 This is the anniversary of my first retirement 🎶

I'm excited to read her autobiography!

me too

another great interview around the book. I'm deeply disillusioned about Prince's treatment of her

Prince's music means the world to me, but the guy could be a complete ass so I wasn't that surprised when I first heard this years ago. I don't think Prince ever responded to it, but I'm guessing he was insanely jealous that she took his song to #1 while his attempt (albeit through the Family) flopped years before when his sales were at their peak.

His ego was ridiculous. After he died, he chewed out someone who was leaving him to work for George Michael. She did it partly because working for him was stressful, but he apparently said, "Who's George Michael? He ain't shit (compared to me)!" And his perfectionism was abusive. One of his horn players in the NPG recalled the pressure he put on him to play a complex solo perfectly, to the point where he would put a prop gun to his head on-stage as intimidation (it didn't sound like it played like a joke, that's for sure). And there are probably countless more stories like that.

After he died, he chewed out someone who was leaving him to work for George Michael.

I guess there is an afterlife.

an ex colleague worked for Prince for a long time ago like.... he was not a nice person

If your life consists of studio time pockmarked with occasional TV binges, softball games, and fucking, how can you be nice, right?

The best story I heard (here?) was Prince tasking his guitar tech to waterproof an amp so that he could play underwater, at the bottom of a pool. The tech was of course doubtful, but spent a ton of time perfecting a rig that would actually work underwater. When he finally got back to Prince, Prince had forgotten all about it. But given it was Prince, I would totally believe he hadn't forgotten about it and was fucking with his tech the whole time. What's always been surprising about the Sinead story is the accusation of physical violence, which as far as I can tell is an outlier in the Prince dossier.

I mean he drove my friend into bankruptcy by not paying him for video production (he did all his video stuff for a while including the video for Seven) and then suing him to bury him in legal fees to avoid paying (after he demanded 24/7/365 servitude for a number of years)

but sure just part of being the great man

I hope that's not what you think I meant!

no sorry! sorry I just get angry remembering the whole thing

A guy with Prince's insane productivity is like a person who goes without sleep: they're not normal. Now add the bowing and scraping of minders and sycophants.

Only a matter of time before someone publishes a major article on Prince's shittiness and the public attitude to the guy shifts in a big way.

Can I just say here that Melody Maker's treatment of Sinead back in the 80s/90s was shameful, exploitative and abusive to quite a large degree.

Can I just say here that Melody Maker's the press' treatment of Sinead back in the 80s/90s was shameful, exploitative and abusive to quite a large degree.

Yeah I'm just remembering MM as that's what I read, dunno if the NME poked "harmless" fun in her direction to the same degree. Did the mainstream press (UK) even acknowledge popular music at that point?