Sinéad O’Connor: “Nothing Compares 2 U” Track Review

Sinéad O’Connor knew what happened when she opened her mouth. “Songs are ghosts,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, and to sing was to transform herself into a “ghost delivery woman.” O’Connor maintained a wry sense of humor about the holy wreckage these spirits could cause: After tracking the demo to “Troy” at record producer and DJ Chris Hill’s house, she was amused to come outside and find him standing there, shaken and ashen-faced. While recording her debut album, 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, she wondered if her unborn son Jacob was “okay in there” because so many of the songs, she wrote, were “a load of yelling.”

“A load of yelling” is a ridiculous way to refer to O’Connor’s singing, but it’s 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. “When I go onstage, I always pray that I can be a priest and that when I leave, people will feel like they’ve been at church,” she wrote.

Before O’Connor got hold of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song was a bluesy ballad that Prince had written for his album with the Family. The original dripped with the sweat of the nightclub, but when O’Connor 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.

When I first encountered “Nothing Compares 2 U,” in 1990, at age nine, I was standing in front of the television, and I was utterly powerless. O’Connor’s 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—oh god—when she sang the line, “I know that livin’ with you baby was sometimes hard,” she started to cry. Why were they still filming her? Couldn’t they stop?

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, “I could put my arms around every boy I see,” she leaned into the flat ehhh sound of “every” 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 (“But they’d only remind me of you”) made it clear she’d turned the claws on herself, too.

There was something sacrificial—an offering, a self-impaling—happening in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and I was not too young to tremble before it. The song parted a curtain I didn’t 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 Sinéad O’Connor 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.