RIP Sinéad O’Connor
I’m not as familiar with Sinéad O’Connor’s later discography, although it was always a nice surprise when she would pop up seemingly randomly in a soundtrack album. But those first two albums (The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got) are absolutely stunning and incredible. And what’s even more incredible is realizing how young she was when she was writing those songs.
The Lion and the Cobra came out when she was twenty years old and was recorded when she was nineteen and twenty. She talked about some of the songs having been written even earlier as a form of therapy when she was in her teens. Read those lyrics and think about a teenager writing them. Unbelievable.
The follow-up album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got includes the cheeky line:
How could I possibly know what I want,
When I was only twenty-one?
…which she is delivering at the ripe old age of twenty-three.
“The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” on the same album manages to pack a lifetime — several lifetimes — of doomed relationships into less than five minutes. It’s a magnificent blending of the broad and the specific, but the specific still being incredibly relatable. The lyric “You used to hold my hand when the plane took off” is relatable to anyone, whether they’ve ever actually been with their lover on a plane before or not.
This is the last day of our acquaintance,
I will meet you later in somebody’s office,
I’ll talk, but you won’t listen to me,
I know what your answer will be.
I could talk for an hour about how perfect the individual word choices are in this song, but there isn’t really a need. Just read the lyrics. Or better, just listen to the song. Anything that’s not on the page is in her voice.
I will live by my own policies,
I will sleep with a clear conscience.
Good night, Sinéad.
