How Sinead O’Connor Shaped Modern Pop Careers

Sinead O’Connor, who died on July 26 at the age of 56, first gained public acclaim for two transcendent albums, then gradually became better known for a chaotic personal life that seemed eccentric until it turned tragic. Years after she infamously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, she declared that she was gay (2000), said she was actually only one-quarter gay (2005), upbraided Miley Cyrus for making sexy videos (2013) and converted to Islam (2018). Throughout the last decade of her life, she struggled publicly with her mental health.

In recent years, she has been reassessed as a trailblazing feminist artist, and her importance will continue to be acknowledged in the days to come. This is well-deserved, and any honest appreciation of her musical gifts shouldn’t end with her first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Long after her music attracted mainstream attention, she made a gorgeous album of Irish folk music (Sean-Nós Nua, 2002) and a compelling set of classic reggae covers (Throw Down Your Arms, 2005), neither of which are available on Spotify or Apple Music. Two of her later recordings were deeply felt covers of old gospel songs, “Troubles Will Soon Be Over” and “Trouble of the World.”

What’s interesting is just how much the themes in her music and her life predicted the way we live and think now. O’Connor’s desire to be marketed as the capital-A artist she was, instead of just an attractive singer, once seemed like a fringe issue but is now a mainstream topic in the music business. Her anger against the Catholic Church’s role in concealing child sexual abuse in the priesthood, which fell on willfully deaf ears in 1992, became widespread a decade later when a major investigation in The Boston Globe made clear the extent of the problem. Her frankness about her shifts in sexuality and issues with mental health, which seemed so unusual at the time, are much more common among younger artists. In many ways, O’Connor talked about subjects that music fans weren’t ready to hear about – until, later on, they were.

Her genre experiments seem modern, too. More than other artists, female singers have often been put in a box – a marketing category, if you prefer – by a music industry that doesn’t always know what to do with them. O’Connor faced that earlier than most (in this, too, she was a pioneer), and, as in other matters, she simply did what she pleased. Sean-Nós Nua might at first seem like minor work from a major artist, but O’Connor delved deeper into these folk standards than most interpreters because she grew up around them. On Throw Down Your Arms, she sings material much more foreign to her, but she goes deep there, too – especially on the four Burning Spear covers that start the album. Like the reggae singers she covers, O’Connor has no use for materialist Babylon, and she turns what seemed like an artistic left turn into a left-field triumph.

O’Connor released her last album in 2014, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, but two more recent covers showed that her vocal and artistic powers hadn’t diminished. On her cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Trouble Will Soon Be Over,” released on a 2016 Johnson tribute album, she circles back to the approach of her first two albums, layering her pure, searing voice atop a minimalist but resonant arrangement. The song starts a cappella, then a guitar and handclaps come in as O’Connor sings about how her faith helps her navigate what she seems to see as a fallen world.

The next song O’Connor released was a 2020 cover of the traditional spiritual “Trouble of the World,” which has become identified with Mahalia Jackson. Shot in stark black-and-white, the video intercuts scenes from racial justice protests with shots of O’Connor walking through a city street in a Black Lives Matter sweatshirt. O’Connor sings mournfully, connecting the current battle against injustice to the weariness of the song’s gospel roots. “Soon it will be done,” she sings, “trouble of the world. Going home to live with God.”