Lioness In A Thunderstorm : A Playlist For Saint Sinead
Sinéad O’Connor lives in my imagination as pure white stained glass: not the jewel-toned kind that announces itself from across a cathedral, but the near-colourless panels that seem almost plain until daylight catches them and reveals the workmanship, the seams, and the hairline fractures that give the surface its life. The image has stayed with me since it fits the way her work entered my world. Comfort was never the purpose, and rebellion was only part of the charge. What she offered, again and again, was a kind of moral weather, a voice that made imposed authority harder to swallow and the hypocrisy of religion tougher to excuse once it had been named with such clarity.
This playlist is arranged as a retrospective rather than a chronology: a curated sequence that follows emotional logic, returns to certain fires twice, and saves one private landmark for the last stretch where it belongs. The opening choice is unavoidable. “Troy” still feels like the summit of what she could do.
The song’s power isn’t volume or drama in isolation; it’s the strange union of delicacy and command, the way her voice can flicker for the briefest moment and still remain sovereign. When the voice catches, it doesn’t register as weakness or accident; it feels like truth breaking through the skin of performance, a brief exposure that sharpens what follows and makes the control feel earned rather than imposed.
Placing “Nothing Compares 2 U” immediately after “Troy” creates a deliberate collision: ferocity followed by stillness that can barely contain itself. The song is often treated as a monument in her story, yet what has always held me is the discipline inside it, the way devastation is kept at the exact temperature where it remains articulate. A lesser singer would chase the emotion. She let the emotion chase her, and still stayed in control.
“Drink Before the War” arrives early to establish the other axis of her greatness: moral clarity that refuses to flatter anything. The track doesn’t circle hypocrisy or soften it into mood; it speaks directly and lets the listener sit in the discomfort. For me, raised inside a coercive religious environment, where doubt was treated like contamination and judgment dressed itself up as virtue, that directness landed as permission, not to be cruel, but to trust anger when anger is a form of perception rather than a tantrum. Her work didn’t require secrecy to take root; it could be heard openly, carried openly, lived with, even when others failed to grasp why it gripped me so completely.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” follows with its own bright, unsentimental force, and the sequence leans into a darker heat: “Fire on Babylon” in remix form, “Famine,” and “This Is to Mother You.” The ordering is deliberate. Rage is allowed to exist without apology, and tenderness arrives without softening the intelligence; “Black Boys On Mopeds” holds the centre like a steady blade, refusing to let political cruelty be turned into a gentle anecdote.
The decision to move “Mandinka” later changes the role it plays in the sequence. Set after the heavier stretch, the track stops being an early sprint and becomes release, the sound of a body returning to speed after being held under water. That pivot opens the quieter mid-set turn: “Thank You for Hearing Me,” “8 Good Reasons,” and “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart,” where her voice moves inward, more conversational in its intimacy, without losing the sense that it could harden into steel again at any moment.
“Fire On Babylon (Live)” makes good on the sense threaded through the earlier tracks: that her anger isn’t just a stance, it’s a force with breath behind it, capable of turning a song into a confrontation with the room. The live version doesn’t refine the emotion; it sharpens it, and the urgency becomes bodily, immediate, unmistakable.
“Kingdom of Rain” is a duet with Matt Johnson of The The on the album Mind Bomb, and her voice enters with a precision that transforms the song into something closer to indictment than lament. The surrounding album is inseparable from my memory of the track. Mind Bomb wasn’t vaguely provocative; it was openly hostile toward organised religion, written in the language of accusation rather than polite critique, and in the world I grew up in that bluntness carried genuine risk. Keeping the album was its own quiet act of dissent, since letting it become visible in the wrong context would have meant it being taken away and treated as evidence of apostasy. The danger wasn’t a single forbidden lyric. The danger was the album’s clarity about power, judgment, and hypocrisy, the very machinery that held my environment together, so even owning it felt like holding contraband.
It’s impossible to write about Sinéad without touching the public punishment that followed her refusal to behave. The 3 October 1992 Saturday Night Live performance, the tearing of Pope John Paul II’s photograph after singing Bob Marley’s “War,” has been simplified so many times that the simplification became its own form of erasure. What interests me now is not the spectacle, but the cost of being early and correct. The world punishes truth-tellers while it can still pretend they’re “overreacting,” and then, years later, absorbs the truth as if it had always been obvious.
From there the playlist leans into the devotional, not as propaganda, but as proof of how her moral anger and her spiritual language were braided, inseparable. “The Lamb’s Book of Life” and “Take Me to Church” belong together for the tension they hold: hunger for God alongside refusal to obey institutions that claim ownership of God. The one non-Sinéad moment, Chris Cornell’s live “Nothing Compares 2 U,” sits like a votive candle placed among the originals, a reminder that the song became a vessel for other voices while the definitive version remains hers.
The late stretch turns private and stranger, not through spectacle, but through mood: theatricality that doesn’t feel like costume, grief that returns as a spell rather than a statement. “Jackie” makes room for that drifting, haunted quality, and the “Night Until Morning” version of “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” carries sorrow in a different light, less like an announcement and more like a recurring incantation. “Just Call Me Joe” shifts the palette before the live “Troy” arrives as a final act of endurance, the whisper still carrying pain before it detonates into something almost unbearable.
Placing “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” directly before the closing track feels right to me, since my relationship to it is welded to memory rather than argument. Seeing her close a New York show with that song in 1994 left an imprint that has never fully faded. The image stays vivid: Sinéad in white, hair grown out, fragile and immortal at once, as though angelic presentation and absolute steel could coexist without contradiction. Hearing it this late makes it feel like a door gently shut before the final statement is delivered.
That statement arrives at the end of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina (Instrumental),” which closes the playlist as a last address to the world. The monologue is fierce, accusatory, and protective at once, refusing charm, refusing compromise, insisting on the cost of truth.
“I’m not a liar and I’m not full of hatred. But I hate lies, and so the liars hate me… pain is what their lies have kept us in. But the war has started now, and truth will win… look at the one wearing the collar: then or now… there’s only ever been one liar… and it’s the Holy Roman Empire… so yeah, i am angry. but i’m not full of hate, i’m full of love. God said, ‘i bring not peace, i bring a sword.’”
When the sequence ends, the stained glass image returns, and it returns in the same colour: pure white. Her work never needed ornament to feel holy. It carried holiness in the seams, in the refusal, in the voice that could crack slightly and still hold the room under its authority. That is the sainthood I mean: not purity, not safety, but grandeur that survives punishment, and a kind of truth that continues to glow when the light hits it.
Playlist · 23 Songs
