{"id":23252,"date":"2025-09-15T06:45:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23252\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T06:45:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:45:06","slug":"sinead-oconnor-and-the-writers-she-inspired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/23252\/","title":{"rendered":"Sin\u00e9ad O’Connor and the writers she inspired"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via The Journal Of Music:<\/a> A new book, Nothing Compares to You: What Sin\u00e9ad O’Connor Means to Us, edited by Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne, brings together 25 essays inspired by the singer. Laura Watson reviews.<\/p>\n

Nothing Compares to You promises ‘an intimate, evocative celebration of the life and legacy of musician and political icon, Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor.\u2019 In this collection of twenty-five essays, \u2018a renowned and multi-generational group of women and nonbinary authors come together to pay tribute to Sin\u00e9ad\u2019s impact on their own lives as humans and artists and on our world at large.\u2019 Editors Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne are US-based writers and journalists, as are most of the contributors. Sin\u00e9ad Gleeson is the only author from Ireland. Just a few of the authors have worked in the music industry, as producers, performers, and journalists. The profile of these essayists \u2013 generally, women writers in the US, many of whom lived their formative years in parallel to O\u2019Connor\u2019s ascent to global fame from 1987 to 1992 \u2013 seems to signal that the artist predominantly \u2018belonged\u2019 or spoke and sang to Gen X women who internalised liberal Western values. This framing is provocative: does it represent O\u2019Connor\u2019s main audience? If so, what does that say about her artistic impact and wider cultural imprint?<\/p>\n

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Given the quantity of essays in the Huber and Bayne volume, I can only discuss a few in detail. To start, an overview may be useful for prospective readers. Each piece is titled after an O\u2019Connor song, the order mostly mirroring the chronology of the artist\u2019s discography. Her duet with U2\u2019s Edge on \u2018Heroine\u2019 (1986) lends its title to the opening piece; the final one pays tribute to \u2018Horse on the Highway\u2019, a 2020 demo for an album yet to be released. Most essays in between lean heavily on the musician\u2019s earlier rock and pop-oriented output. Five invoke songs from her debut album The Lion and the Cobra (1987); eight are named after tracks from I Do Not Want What I Haven\u2019t Got (1990); one centres on \u2018My Special Child\u2019 (a single from 1990); one draws from Am I Not Your Girl? (1992); and one cites her rendition of Bob Marley\u2019s \u2018War\u2019 (on SNL in 1992). That SNL performance ended with O\u2019Connor altering the closing lyrics of \u2018War\u2019 to condemn child abuse and ripping up a picture of the pope. It also saw her exiled from the mainstream music industry. Still, she released seven more studio albums from 1994 to 2014, producing an eclectic body of work which departed considerably from her earlier sound. While three songs from Universal Mother (1994) are discussed, comparatively little space is given to her later, twenty-first-century output. It would be unfair to criticise the book unduly for this, as that imbalance is a function of the music history and media narratives which until very recently reduced O\u2019Connor to a female rock rebel who lost her way in 1992.<\/p>\n

Touchstones of her life story<\/p>\n

Most essays comprise deeply personal stories, yet there are recurrent themes such as surviving abuse, what it means to mother, grief, feminist resistance, and the role of religion and faith in women\u2019s lives. Anyone who has followed O\u2019Connor\u2019s career will know that those themes are also touchstones of her life story and lyrics. They reverberate here as the authors tend to identify with the singer or feel a sense of shared history with her. Returning to the question of how that framing represents the artist\u2019s audience, on the one hand it succeeds at showing how O\u2019Connor was a beacon for people, especially women, who felt marginalised and struggled to find their place in the world. On the other hand, that focus means the project risks losing readers who are primarily music fans and want to think more about its subject: although each piece is ostensibly themed around a song, some have little to say about the track in question and O\u2019Connor herself recedes out of view.<\/p>\n

Other essays centre the musician while still finding space for the author\u2019s story. Allyson McCabe sheds light on O\u2019Connor\u2019s last creative phase by discussing her little-known 2020 demo \u2018Horse on the Highway\u2019, hearing in it the \u2018unguardedness\u2019 of an \u2018anguished voice\u2026 resolving in her music what could not be resolved in life.\u2019 That vulnerability, McCabe explains, inspired her to \u2018honour Sin\u00e9ad\u2019s bravery\u2019 by revealing painful truths about her own life in her writing. As a journalist who interviewed O\u2019Connor in 2021, she brings further authentic insights to this piece.<\/p>\n

\"NA\"<\/p>\n

An artist still evolving<\/p>\n

Sin\u00e9ad Gleeson\u2019s essay is similarly informed by encounters with the singer in later life, at and behind the scenes of the last concert she played in Dublin, in 2019. Recalling her performance of \u2018Milestones\u2019, another new song also only available as a demo, and the singer backstage \u2018wearing a hijab\u2026smiling, happy, holding tight to [her daughter\u2019s] arm\u2019, the author gives readers a glimpse of O\u2019Connor as a creative and contented middle-aged woman, who had recently converted to Islam. That version of Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor \u2013 a woman who had found some peace in her fifties, a mother of adult children and a grandmother, an artist who was still evolving \u2013 is rarely acknowledged in the public discourse. Most of the obituaries in 2023 fixated on her youthful achievements and beauty. For that reason, essays such as those by Gleeson and McCabe matter.<\/p>\n

Most essays comprise deeply personal stories, yet there are recurrent themes such as surviving abuse, what it means to mother, grief, feminist resistance, and the role of religion and faith in women’s lives.<\/p>\n

Sharbari Zohra Ahmed is also attentive to the older O\u2019Connor \u2013 or Shuhada\u2019 Sadaqat as she renamed herself when she became a Muslim in 2018. Ahmed, describing her own struggles with what it means to be a Muslim woman, credits O\u2019Connor\/Sadaqat with teaching her to see Islam in a new light: \u2018she viewed it as expansive; it made sense to her and was now making sense to me.\u2019 This, the opening essay in the book, challenges the orthodoxy that centres Catholic Ireland in O\u2019Connor\u2019s life. Even if one is not wholly convinced by the interpretation of \u2018how Islamic\u2019 the song \u2018Heroine\u2019 is \u2013 she wrote and recorded it in 1986, decades before converting \u2013 Ahmed\u2019s perspective is important because it positions the artist as a figure relevant to the Muslim world, with a reach beyond the Western audiences with whom she is normally associated. Porochista Khakpour, in an epistolatory piece that recalls O\u2019Connor\u2019s open letters to various celebrities and politicians, also cites Islam as a point of connection between the artist and herself.<\/p>\n

There is still plenty of reference to repressive Catholic Ireland and O\u2019Connor\u2019s defiance of its values, but much of it hinges on her SNL protest. With several authors noting this incident, it becomes something of a trope, reinforcing the existing (and US-centric) narrative about the musician. Viewing her through a US lens, as many contributors do, perhaps explains a few inaccuracies about Ireland, such as the claims that the young Sin\u00e9ad was sent to a \u2018Waterford Laundry\u2019 (it was An Grian\u00e1n reformatory school in Dublin) and that her parents divorced in the 1970s (when it was prohibited). Another way in which O\u2019Connor took a stance against repressive Ireland, especially its systemic misogyny, was by creating work about women\u2019s bodies and reproductive lives. As stated in her memoir Rememberings, she wrote \u2018Three Babies\u2019 (1990) about three miscarriages she suffered. Another song, \u2018My Special Child\u2019 (1991), refers to an abortion she had and the circumstances that prompted this decision. Two essays engage with these songs: Brooke Champagne takes \u2018Three Babies\u2019 as a departure point for reflecting on her own complicated pregnancy history, while Jill Christman responds to \u2018My Special Child\u2019 with a personal piece about how circumstances shape the choices women make about motherhood.<\/p>\n

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Vulnerability<\/p>\n

A few contributors are perceptive about how O\u2019Connor projected vulnerability in her art. Christman hears the strange absence of a chorus and the interjection of a spoken address in \u2018My Special Child\u2019 as means of \u2018processing trauma through music.\u2019 Stacey Lynn Brown\u2019s meditation on \u2018I Do Not Want What I Haven\u2019t Got\u2019 sits with the a cappella nature of the recording and the almost uncomfortable intimacy the exposed voice creates with the listener. \u2018Sin\u00e9ad\u2019s breath is audible, the gasping, deep inhalations\u2019 demand \u2018the listener\u2019s willingness to follow breath wherever it may lead\u2019, Brown writes. Another performance produced to focus on the voice, albeit with a minimalist droning accompaniment, is \u2018Molly Malone\u2019 on Sean-N\u00f3s Nua (2002). Nalini Jones observes that \u2018O\u2019Connor slowed the tempo to the halting progress of a barrow over cobblestones\u2019, thereby giving insights into how the singer\u2019s interpretation of the material rejects clich\u00e9d \u2018singsong arrangements\u2019 for tourists and returns to its roots as a lament. Weaving in her own history as a producer in the folk scene, Jones argues that O\u2019Connor belongs to the folk tradition of voices \u2018that speak truth to power\u2019 and \u2018aren\u2019t seeking to make people comfortable.\u2019<\/p>\n

To conclude, let\u2019s return to questions raised earlier \u2013 what does this book as a whole suggest to us about this artist\u2019s reach and legacy? Arguably its main achievement is highlighting her broad social and cultural impact: she was an icon of a liberalised Ireland, an internationally recognised radical figure, and an empowering, empathetic voice for women coping with a range of circumstances, from the patriarchal dictates of religions to private grief about pregnancy loss. O\u2019Connor\u2019s musical output is discussed to some extent too, but coverage of her career trajectory is uneven, with much variability in how her work is analysed. For readers who are fans of the musician, there is much to explore here. Those of a more critical or musicological persuasion should also find several essays informative and thought-provoking. But the patchy consideration of O\u2019Connor\u2019s place in music history, understandable though it may be in a collection of personal pieces, seems to slightly undermine the book\u2019s aim of celebrating its subject. There is still much to be said in the posthumous appraisal of O\u2019Connor as an artist.<\/p>\n

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Nothing Compares to You: What Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor Means to Us, edited by Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne, is published by Atria\/One Signal, imprints of Simon & Schuster. Read more from The Journal Of Music here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Via The Journal Of Music: A new book, Nothing Compares to You: What Sin\u00e9ad O’Connor Means to Us,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-23252","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}