sinead o'connor

[Brian J Dillard <dillardb@student.msu.edu>]

i agree with whomever said sinead ranks up there in the holy lands. to my mind,
kate is the mother, sinead is the daughter and bjork is the holy ghost.

this info courtesy of us magazine: sinead's _universal mother_ will be out in
the u.s. in september. it is supposed to get her away from her angry image and
showcase her gentler, child-rearing side. it includes an acoustic cover of
nirvana's _all apologies_. i, for one cannot wait.

it's
strange that i should love sinead as much as i do and NOT like tori any more
than i do . . . . sinead's songwriting is very confessional at times, much like
tori's. bjork's, on the other hand, seems much closer to kate's. well, not
really. what i mean is that there seem to be a lot of flights of fancy and a
lot of strange little stories. little personal angst.

all of this, of course, begs the question: what do you all think of the red
shoes, which comes closest of all kate's albums to penetrating her own personal
live and loves? the dreaming seems to be about anger, be about tricksters and
criminals and con artists and soldiers and murderers. hounds of love seems to
be about, well, love, but it's definitely an intellectual exercise, examining
love from a number of different perspectives.

the red shoes seems very personally melancholy--especially my favorite songs on
it (and so is love, moments of pleasure). constellation of the heart is a call
to self-examination, and kate sings a lot about safety and danger in one's
romantic life. i , for one, can't help but read it as her personal feelings,
knowing as we all do that she has been with del for what, 16 years? "life is
sad and so is love" "just being alive, it can really hurt" . . . . .

do you all think this is a shift toward a more autobiographical sort of
songwriting? do you think she is trying on herself as a character the same way
she has tried on cathy and all the others since?

i, for one, like the way she turns a song about self-reflection (constellation
of the heart) into a science-fiction epic. does anybody know if she is a big
fan or sci-fi books and/or movies? experiment IV, breathing, constellation all
bear the mark . . . .

brian