{"id":558549,"date":"2026-07-25T06:19:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558549\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T06:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:19:09","slug":"sinead-oconnor-nothing-compares-2-u-track-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558549\/","title":{"rendered":"Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor: \u201cNothing Compares 2 U\u201d Track Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor<\/a> knew what happened when she opened her mouth. \u201cSongs are ghosts,\u201d she wrote in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, and to sing was to transform herself into a \u201cghost delivery woman.\u201d O\u2019Connor maintained a wry sense of humor about the holy wreckage these spirits could cause: After tracking the demo to \u201cTroy\u201d at record producer and DJ Chris Hill\u2019s house, she was amused to come outside and find him standing there, shaken and ashen-faced. While recording her debut album, 1987\u2019s The Lion and the Cobra<\/a>, she wondered if her unborn son Jacob was \u201cokay in there\u201d because so many of the songs, she wrote, were \u201ca load of yelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA load of yelling\u201d is a ridiculous way to refer to O\u2019Connor\u2019s singing, but it\u2019s a reminder she wore her ability lightly while remaining clear-eyed about her power over others. She could move people. She could redeem them. She could hurt them. \u201cWhen I go onstage, I always pray that I can be a priest and that when I leave, people will feel like they\u2019ve been at church,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Before O\u2019Connor got hold of \u201cNothing Compares 2 U,\u201d the song was a bluesy ballad that Prince<\/a> had written for his album with the Family. The original dripped with the sweat of the nightclub, but when O\u2019Connor stepped inside the song, she sensed the outlines of a church. And when she drew breath to fill that space, she made you feel that pews are just boards, the walls just stones. Our voices are what makes them quake.<\/p>\n

When I first encountered \u201cNothing Compares 2 U,\u201d in 1990, at age nine, I was standing in front of the television, and I was utterly powerless. O\u2019Connor\u2019s face filled the screen, her crystal-blue eyes piercing me in my own living room. I felt implicated. She was looking directly at me, but could not see me looking back. She seemed too upset for a televised appearance. Was someone supposed to turn the camera off? And then\u2014oh god\u2014when she sang the line, \u201cI know that livin\u2019 with you baby was sometimes hard,\u201d she started to cry. Why were they still filming her? Couldn\u2019t they stop?<\/p>\n

The raw longing in the performance frightened me. There was a wildness in it, something animal that had slipped free. When she sang the line, \u201cI could put my arms around every boy I see,\u201d she leaned into the flat ehhh sound of \u201cevery\u201d with hawklike violence. There was something pinpointed and merciless in it, as if she had darted out with a talon and sliced open my belly. I wanted, instinctively, to protect myself. But the way she gasped the next seven words (\u201cBut they\u2019d only remind me of you\u201d) made it clear she\u2019d turned the claws on herself, too.<\/p>\n

There was something sacrificial\u2014an offering, a self-impaling\u2014happening in \u201cNothing Compares 2 U,\u201d and I was not too young to tremble before it. The song parted a curtain I didn\u2019t wish to see behind, like watching my mother cry through a cracked bedroom door. The video played often on MTV, which meant that my experience with Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor was replicated by millions. MTV, back then, was always on, which meant her face, softly lit and appearing in extreme close-up, appeared in my living room dozens of times in the span of a week. My father murmured about her shaved head; my mother complimented her pretty eyes. When I went to school, other kids joked about her uneasily, like a new kid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor knew what happened when she opened her mouth. \u201cSongs are ghosts,\u201d she wrote in her 2021…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409,175158],"class_list":["post-558549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-saturday-tracks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}