‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: How Sinéad O’Connor Turned a Prince Song Into Her Classic

Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer-songwriter, died Wednesday at age 56, her family announced. In remembrance, we’re resurfacing a 2021 episode of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s that looked at her legacy and how she made the Prince-written “Nothing Compares 2 U” a classic all her own. Below is an extended excerpt of the episode’s script. Listen to the entire episode here.

This is a story about Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Prince wrote it. She took it. It’s her song. But it cost her dearly.

Prince, as you are probably aware, wrote a shit ton of songs. And gave a shit ton away. And it transpires that some of those songs just sound better when sung by a woman. The Bangles doing “Manic Monday.” Chaka Khan doing “I Feel for You.” Sheila E. doing “The Glamorous Life.” You want the truth? Cyndi Lauper’s version of “When U Were Mine” is better than Prince’s version of “When You Were Mine.” That’s right. What are you gonna do about it? I’m not on Twitter (as far as you know, probably). You don’t know where to find me. It’s not that Cyndi Lauper changed the meaning of this song, it’s that Cyndi Lauper distilled the pure exquisite flamboyant misery of this song.

But Sinéad O’Connor doing “Nothing Compares 2 U” on her second album, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—this is different. However cordial the initial business transaction here—the process by which Prince allowed her to record and release his song—forget all that. This is a hostile takeover. Sinéad embodies this song on a molecular level. She changes the fundamental meaning of this song. She owns this song. She steals this song. Just the audacity of that. The greatness and the fearlessness required of her to do that. Sinéad O’Connor saying, “I’m gonna steal a song from Prince,” is like Nicolas Cage saying, “I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence.”

But that’s what she did.

Who is this person? What does she want? What doesn’t she want? What do we want from her? In June 2021 Sinéad O’Connor published a memoir called Rememberings. It’s rough. She was born in Glenageary, Ireland, in 1966. The third of four children. Her parents split up when she was 9; she split time between her father, who was initially granted custody of the children, and her mother, who in Sinéad’s account was physically and mentally abusive. Sinéad mentions a few times that when she’d come home from school for the summer she’d pretend she’d lost her field hockey stick, because she didn’t want her mother to beat her with it. She says her mother would beat her with a carpet-sweeper pole instead and make Sinéad say, “I am nothing,” over and over. That’s it for details. Her mother died in a car accident when Sinéad was 18, shortly before she got her first record deal. I tell you that much only because this might somewhat explain both the fragility and the ferocity with which Sinéad O’Connor sings, and the hard-fought self-assurance she brings to every song she’s ever sung.

Songs That Explain the ’90s, the Book

If you’ve ever listened to 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s and thought, “I wish this podcast were a book,” do we have some news for you. Songs That Explain the ’90s is out now on Twelve Books. Order here.

The pop-star-memoir arc, generally—the Rise and Fall narrative you know and love from any Oscar-nominated biopic or tawdry VH1 Behind the Music episode you’ve ever watched—at least there’s a rise, right? At least there’s a brief period when the pop’s star discovery, and breakthrough success, and apex fame and fortune are enjoyed by the pop star. Over-enjoyed, inevitably. But enjoyed. But Sinéad’s book is rough going in this respect as well. She writes that she was sitting on the toilet—she wants you to know that she can’t remember whose toilet—when she is informed that both “Nothing Compares 2 U” and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got have both hit no. 1 in America, on the singles and albums charts respectively. She writes, “Whoever it was who told me got cross with me because I didn’t take the news happily. Instead, I cried like a child at the gates of hell.”

Sinéad’s first album, released in 1987, was called The Lion and the Cobra. A biblical name. From Psalm 91.

If you say, “The Lord is my refuge”
And you make the Most High your dwelling
No harm will overtake you
No disaster will come near your tent

And so on. You will tread on the lion and the cobra. And so on. The record company didn’t like the way Sinéad looked on the cover of The Lion and the Cobra, her mouth wide open, her head shaved of course. They thought she looked angry. They thought she looked like she’s screaming. The record company preferred another image from the photo shoot where she’s looking down, and her mouth is closed. Good luck with that, record company. She’s not screaming, actually. She’s just singing. That’s just the way she looks when she sings.

The biggest single off this record was called “Mandinka.” Sinéad was inspired by Roots, the blockbuster 1977 TV series based on Alex Haley’s famous novel about slavery. She writes, “I was a young girl when I saw it, and it moved something so deeply in me, I had a visceral response. I came to emotionally identify with the civil rights movement and slavery, especially given the theocracy I lived in and the oppression in my own home.” That’s a tricky comparison for Sinéad to be making. But just try to convince this person to not speak her mind.

Sinéad’s sophomore album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, came out in 1990. This album title came to her in a dream. So first Sinéad had gone to a medium, and through the medium had spoken to her mother, who’d been dead at this point for a year and a half. And her mother asked for forgiveness, for all the pain she’d caused her children, but Sinéad’s older sister, Éimear, could not forgive her mother. That night Sinéad’s mother comes to her in a dream, and Sinéad says she’s sorry that Éimear can’t forgive her, and their mother just says, “I do not want what I haven’t got.” Because she knew she didn’t deserve forgiveness.

So that’s the album title, and the last song on the album. The first song on the album is called “Feels So Different.” It is also about her mother.

What drives this album, and seems to drive the whole of Sinéad O’Connor’s career, is the realization that forgiving someone can feel heavier than not forgiving someone. Or maybe it’s just that her forgiveness will feel heavier to you.

The second track on this album is called “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” and samples James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” Sinéad still thinks about her mother when she sings it live. The third track is called “Three Babies” and is about the three miscarriages Sinéad had, though now it’s also about the four children she did have. The fourth track is called “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and is probably the single lightest and poppiest song Sinéad ever did, and includes my favorite lyrics of hers ever.

Because even at her lightest and poppiest, she’ll still drag you to the gates of hell, if that’s where you need to go.

The fifth track is called “Black Boys on Mopeds.” It’s about two Black teenagers in London who died during a botched police chase. “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses / It’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds.” That’s how the chorus starts. This record is not fucking around.

The sixth track is called “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Written by Prince, and originally released in 1985 by his side project, the Family. Paul Joseph Peterson, better known as St. Paul, a Prince cohort and as it happens a former member of the Time, was the Family’s lead singer, and he sings the hell out of the original version of this song, though mostly only super-intense Prince fans were paying much attention at the time.

Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 16, 2016. He’d just started working on a memoir, cowritten with the journalist Dan Piepenbring. That book, or the best-case scenario of that book under the circumstances, finally came out in 2019. It’s called The Beautiful Ones. Prince wrote some of it. Dan wrote some of it. Some of it is Dan transcribing Prince talking on the phone about what Prince had already written. In any event, “Nothing Compares 2 U” comes up briefly, when Prince is talking about his parents’ divorce when he was just a kid, which you do not have to be a super-intense Prince fan to know was one of the most traumatic events of his entire life. His father left. The kids stayed with his mother. And his mother used to call his father, late at night, and beg him to come home, and wake up young Prince and his sister so they could beg their father to come home. And at this point Prince says, “I think that’s why I can write such good breakup songs, like ‘Nothing Compares 2 U.’ I ain’t heard no breakup song like I can write. The flowers are dead.” (At this point Prince pretends to receive an urgent phone call.) “Sir, the garden’s dead.” And Prince sums it up by saying, “I have that knowledge.”

But when Sinéad O’Connor gets ahold of this song, she brings her knowledge to it, also. She brings a whole new meaning to it. Because as you’ve probably guessed by now if you didn’t know it already, she’s singing this song to her own mother.

This is the exact moment in the video when it’s clear she’s about to start crying. It’s a little embarrassing, if I’m honest, how revolutionary the music video for Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” felt back in 1991 when MTV put it in Ultra-Mega-Heavy rotation. The bulk of the video is just Sinéad, in close-up, of course with her head shaved, just singing the song, and eventually crying. She’s wearing a black turtleneck and singing against a black background, so it looks like her shaved head is floating in space. Per her memoir, she’d first shaved her head before her first album came out, after her label handlers told her that they’d like her to, quote, “stop cutting my hair short and start dressing like a girl.” Specifically, they’d, quote, “like me to wear short skirts with boots and perhaps some feminine accessories such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other noisy items one couldn’t possibly wear close to a microphone.”

She accused them of trying to make her look like their mistresses, and had her head shaved the next day. And that was that. The Greek barber who actually did the shaving cried, also. So now we got just this woman’s head, tears rolling down her cheeks, just singing: no explosions, no quick cuts, none of that hyperactive “MTV-style editing” everybody was always complaining about. Just the stillness, the gravity, the gorgeous severity of it—it’s almost embarrassing how anomalous it all felt given the nonstop barrage that was everything else on MTV at the time. How many televisions did I see blow up on MTV during the first 10 years of MTV? How many dudes in tight pants trying to shock me? But none of those dudes shocked me half as much as the pure contempt on this woman’s face, as she recounted her trip to the doctor.

Can you fuckin’ believe what this doctor said?

He said “Girl you better try to have fun no matter what you do”
But he’s a fool

Nobody tells Sinéad O’Connor what to do. Not even Prince. In 1991 the readers of Rolling Stone named Sinéad O’Connor Artist of the Year. And I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got Album of the Year. And “Nothing Compares 2 U” Song of the Year. They also named her Best Female Singer. They also—these were different voters, presumably—named her Worst Female Singer, because she was already plenty polarizing. (At that point her biggest scandal in America was when she politely, she says, declined to let them play the national anthem before a show in New Jersey.) So Rolling Stone interviews Sinéad about all of this, and how much she loves Van Morrison and Roseanne Barr and Andy Garcia (all for different reasons), and how much she dislikes Frank Sinatra and Andrew Dice Clay and Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. (Some of whom had talked trash about her first, some of whom had not.) But she also talked about the terrible experience she’d had with Prince. She said Prince physically threatened her. This was not the first interview where she’d discussed this. But by this point she was so fed up she was ready to leave “Nothing Compares 2 U” behind.

Quote: “It spoiled the song completely for me. I feel a connection with the song, but the experience was a very disturbing one. At the moment I really don’t like the idea of singing the song. I need to get to the stage where I can separate the writer from the song—which I suppose I always did before. But I’m just very angry with him. Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to spend the rest of my life singing the song that I had that went to Number One. That’s not what I’m all about. I do other stuff, too. I mean, I’ve sung the song so many times that I’m bored with the song at this stage.”

So in terms of new information, what she writes about Prince in her 2021 memoir—what she writes about one specific encounter with Prince—this is not new information. It’s just more detailed. It’s just more upsetting. The broad strokes here: She’s in L.A., set up in a house while she’s waiting for the MTV Video Music Awards. This is nine months after her album and her song both hit no. 1. One wall of this house has a giant glass window facing the lights of Los Angeles, and she writes, “At night, it’s like a black frame around the lights of living hell.”

Prince calls her. He pronounces her name “Shine-head O’Kahn-er.” He summons her to his place in L.A. He sends a car for her. This is their first interaction in several years. She gets to his house. It’s weird, it’s awkward, it’s creepy. She’s alone with him. First they talk in his kitchen. He tells her she doesn’t like the foul language she uses in her interviews. She tells him, “I don’t work for you. If you don’t like it, you can fuck yourself.” He walks off. She is summoned to a dining room. He tries to serve her soup. He gets really aggro when she refuses the soup. He hassles the assistant who brought out the soup because she won’t eat the soup: This assistant turns out to be Prince’s brother, Duane. Prince leaves again, and returns with pillows, and announces he’d like to have a pillow fight, and hits her with a pillow, and clearly he’s stuffed some sort of heavy object into his pillow case. She runs out the front door. He chases her. It’s nighttime, she’s alone, has no idea where she is, she has no way to get back to her own place other than to run. She runs into the woods. Eventually she makes it to a road, and to some other houses, but then Prince shows up driving a car, and gets out, and they chase each other for a brief spell, and then she runs to one of the nearby houses and rings the doorbell frantically, and finally he drives off. This chapter ends with her writing, “I never want to see that devil again. But I think of Duane fondly, quite often.”

I know you don’t need me to say this but I can’t tell you what to think or how to feel about any of this. I can’t tell you if or how it should change the way you feel about him, or about her, or about this song. There is no true, clean, definitive way to Separate the Art From the Artist. Art fully separated from the artist ceases, in a fundamental way, to be art at all. The artist gives the art meaning. I’m the sort of guy inclined to tear up, even now, just typing, let alone saying out loud, the words, “Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 16, 2016.” I can mourn the artist. I can mourn the person, to the extent you can mourn a person you never met. But I can also mourn my naive, saintly image of that person, when I’m given yet more compelling evidence that being one of the Greatest Artists of Your Generation does not automatically make you one of the Greatest Humans of Your Generation.

One of the first posthumous pieces of music released from Prince’s apparently gargantuan vault was his own original studio version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” He recorded it in 1984. The wider world finally got to hear it in 2018. I teared up the first time I heard this, too.

But it’s not his song. Another thing Sinéad talks about in her memoir is how sometimes when she meets people, she can picture their houses. I should let her explain this. “From the time I turned 18, if I was sitting with people I had met only once or twice, I would see in my mind the inside of their houses. I’d see the carpets, the walls, the paintings on the walls, the tiny trinkets on bedside cabinets, the colors of the pots and pans, the stash of private letters, everything. It was as if I were floating about in their rooms.”

Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is the sound of her floating in Prince’s room. If you’re even a casual Prince fan you know something of the whole Paisley Park mystique of Prince. He’s a god, but he’s also just a man. He’s a weirdo, but he’s also sometimes emphatically normal, which is somehow weirder. I’ve read so many Prince profiles, Prince interviews, Prince think pieces, Prince books. I know the rhythm. You can’t use a tape recorder to record his voice. You can’t take pictures. You can’t swear. But he’s also disarmingly polite, and disarmingly … human. The kind of guy who’ll invite you over to play basketball and then serve you pancakes. I don’t know how to separate the art from the artist here, or the artist from the human. But in this song Sinéad sees something that no one else sees, and feels something no one else feels. Things Prince very likely isn’t aware of himself. It’s a beautiful song. He wrote a beautiful song. But she gets more out of it than he does. She gets more out of the word try than he gets out of the whole song.

I know that livin’ with you baby was sometimes hard
But I’m willing to give it another try

In 1992, for her second song as the music guest during her second appearance on Saturday Night Live, Sinéad O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella, and after singing the last line—“We have confidence in the victory of good over evil”—she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II and yelled, “Fight the real enemy.” Her mother’s photo of Pope John Paul II, as it turns out. The photo she’d pulled off her mother’s bedroom wall on the day her mother died. Sinéad did this to protest child abuse within the Catholic Church. She had a point. Leave it at that. However you feel about this—maybe especially if it upsets you—this was, indeed, the single most Punk Rock gesture of the 1990s. In her book she writes about going back to her hotel afterward and turning on the TV. “The matter is being discussed on the news and we learn I am banned from NBC for life. This hurts me a lot less than rapes hurt those Irish children,” she wrote. You asked for the truth, and she told you.

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.