i have it in my head that i can recognise his song, pick him out, i mean distinct from all his flockmates. and my sons insist it’s fiction; ‘heard one blackbird, heard them all.’ but there are times he whistles up a recollection.
Sinéad O’Connor dedicates her new album to her brother, the novelist Joseph O’Connor, and he in turn dedicates it to her with a prose poem called “Voice” in the album’s liner notes (excerpted above). With reverence and humor, he speaks of his sister’s voice and her musical antecedents, which are all over the map and mentioned only by first name, Patti among them. He successfully casts her into a community, makes her the grace of it, which is funny, as I’ve never thought of Sinéad O’Connor as part of a lineage, or being much in need of historical example, Patti Smith or otherwise, to validate her musical choices. On How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, as if in response to the title, the recollection she continues to whistle up is primarily of herself, which is not to call her selfish or uninspired, but to say that the voice remains, ageless and immune to authority.
Funny, too, that I wrote all of this before knowing about O’Connor’s recent struggles with bipolar disorder and her cries for help in the internet’s saddest corners. I can only comment on personal life that’s been rendered as or vanquished by art, and though I might have been too quick to find this new album wounded yet triumphant, it’s still the one hope offered, that some major force created these songs. It might not be true today, but O’Connor on these recordings seems to have her priorities straight, her means of (perhaps unattainable) happiness laid out plain: she dresses up according to the ancient code of pleasing her man on “4th & Vine” but refuses to do so for the hollow code of fashion on “V.I.P.”; she sings as much of love as of its failure; she knows how to choose another person’s song to sing.
In fact, the best song here is a cover of John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark” (the title track from his excellent 2010 album), which in its original version sounded distinctly homosexual but now seems to have been written specifically for O’Connor, so convincingly does she utter lines like “I casually mention that I pissed in your coffee”: calculated, not casual at all. In a way the song becomes an angrier extension of the lonely place of “Nothing Compares 2 U” (and a good vantage to start thinking about the heretofore unconsidered similarities of Grant and Prince as songwriters). “I wanted to change the world, but I could not even change my underwear,” O’Connor begins, and how long has she been in such a state? Seven hours and 15 days, most likely. It’s a great pleasure to hear her sing Grant’s words, especially the ones that should cause gender confusion or dissonance but don’t because of their surprising but undeniable appropriateness, and even the ones that should be painful confessions but aren’t because of the humor of Grant’s songwriting and O’Connor’s delivery. And when her band erases some of the original’s nuance and gets the chorus’s outrage across with power chords, edging into a sort of shoegaze squall just where Grant pulls back into his piano ballad, it works, because O’Connor has already knocked down any restrictions of interpretation with her voice.
That’s the funniest thing about How About I Be Me, that it’s an accidental rock ‘n’ roll album, straying with ease into larger-than-life guitar bombast, the kind that made me so surprised to find Catherine Wheel’s Rob Dickinson working at some nameless store in one of my recent dreams: People who’ve been buoyed by such chords can’t return to dull, ordinary life, right? How About I Be Me owes something to Catherine Wheel’s late 90s version of British rock music, its gentle but determined uplift (think of their “Ma Solituda,” and maybe think of O’Connor by that name). O’Connor, for her part, won’t have us think of her as a V.I.P. for any of the wrong reasons. The music here is unfashionable enough to not be the work of fashion, but autobiographical as these songs might be, it’s the willed self-creation of art that gives O’Connor her strength.
