Stolen from Our Very Eyes
Sinéad O'Connor meant as much to me as any person whom I've never actually met.
And from spending many hours listening to her music plus reading her excellent recent memoir, I feel in some sense like I know her better than many of the people with whom I'm personally acquainted.
That extraordinary immediacy is a tribute to the raw power of her voice, her words, and the tremendous (personal and political) courage of her art. She was – in my subjective estimation – the greatest singer of our time and one of its most distinctive and expressive songwriters. If your familiarity with her work doesn't extend much beyond "Nothing Compares 2 U" and the Saturday Night Live incident, please do watch these video clips, above.
O'Connor's first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, are two of the finest ever recorded. "Troy," off the former album but best in its more austere live form (e.g., the video posted at top), was written when she was a teenager, inspired by a Yeats poem engaging with Homer and shot through with memories of profound trauma and abuse. Yet it is resilient and cathartic, invoking the Phoenix as its central image –– a decidedly haunting image on this very sad day.
"Troy" was already, quite arrestingly, the work of a fully formed and singular artist of the highest order, while also that of an emotionally fractured and troubled young person who would spend her adulthood trying to seek out stability and peace. Such solace of spirit, at which she was grasping from her earliest songs to her last and from Catholicism to Rastafarianism to Islam, seemed tragically to elude her, save perhaps for brief, fleeting periods of her life.
If pressed to choose, "Troy" is my favourite song – not just from O'Connor's catalogue, but of the whole pop/rock era. Its lyrics are given in full below.
