Sinead Keeps The Faith
The outspoken Irish singer sounds
off on her new priesthood, celibacy,
child rearing--and making her best
album in years
BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY/DUBLIN
Bewley's Cafe would not seem to be a Sinead
O'Connor kind of place. Given her reputation as a
fiery, outspoken singer, one might expect her to
favor shadowy, wrong-side-of-town pubs.
Bewley's on Westmoreland Street at first glace
seems like the kind of coffeehouse where one
might spy Chandler, Monica and the rest of the
Friends gang sipping cappuccinos. But in truth,
Bewley's is a historic chain in Ireland (James
Joyce is claimed as a past patron), so this is
where O'Connor, who lives nearby in a
three-bedroom apartment, chooses to meet and
talk about Faith and Courage, her brilliant new
album that's due out next week.
She arrives at the table smiling and carrying a
tray of water and tea. O'Connor is small and
slight in person but visually arresting. As is often
her custom, she has shaved the jet-black hair on
her scalp down to about as much stubble as
you'd find on George Clooney's cheeks if he went
razorless for a long weekend. Her nearly bare
head, combined with her wide, bright eyes, gives
her a beautiful, birdlike appearance, like
something newly hatched. She's wearing brown
boots, a blue coat that drapes below her knees,
black sunglasses perched on the top of her head
and--most significant--a white priest's collar
around her neck.
O'Connor's life has had enough twists and turns
and zigs and zags to fill up a month of Behind
the Music episodes. The priest's collar is her
latest zag. After years of criticizing Roman
Catholicism (including infamously ripping up a
picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night
Live in 1992), she decided last year to be
ordained as a priest by controversial Irish
clergyman Bishop Michael Cox, the leader of a
tiny religious sect. However, O'Connor hasn't
quite joined mainstream Catholicism. Cox has
come under fire in the past for reportedly offering
confession over the telephone. And according to
Des Cryan, assistant director of the Catholic
Press and Information Office in Dublin, Cox's
"holy orders are not recognized by the Catholic
Church in Ireland." Besides which, Cryan adds,
"the Catholic Church does not ordain women to
the priesthood."
O.K., so what else has O'Connor been doing
these past few years? Well, O'Connor, whose
last full-length album, Universal Mother, was
released in 1994, says she's been raising her
son Jake, 11, and her daughter Roisin, 3.
(O'Connor is divorced, and her children have
different fathers, the former by an ex-husband,
the latter by an ex-boyfriend.) She has also
passed the time deciding which record company
she wanted to move to after her old label,
Chrysalis, went under (she is now signed to
Atlantic). She has gone through years of therapy
(she has charged in the past that her mother,
now dead, abused her as a child) and says she
feels happier than she has ever felt.
"I was 20 when my first record came out," she
says. "Now I'm 33, and that gives you a
confidence and self-assurance and wisdom and
more familiarity with your soul. When you're
young, you don't really know what the f___ it is
you're aiming at. But the voice inside you gets
louder as you get older, and you get more
directions from it. So on this album there's more
of a sense of self-assurance and more
awareness of what it is I'm trying to communicate
as an artist."
Faith and Courage is one of the best CDs of the
year. On her past albums, O'Connor's songs
burned with anger. Her new album, for which she
recruited a wide range of producers, including
hip-hopper Wyclef Jean, radiates forgiveness,
and the music is often as sweet and smooth as
strawberries and cream. A few tracks, including
The Healing Room, beam with sunny reggae
rhythms. The album is dedicated to "all Rastafari
people." In one song, What Doesn't Belong to
Me, O'Connor sings from the perspective of God,
rejecting the self-segregation in the world: "I'm
Irish, I'm English, I'm Muslim, I'm Jewish/ I'm a
girl, I'm a boy/ and the goddess meant for me
only joy." On another track, The Lamb's Book of
Life, O'Connor becomes Ireland itself, running
from history and searching for redemption in
America: "I know that I have done many things/
To give you reason not to listen to me/ ... Words
can't express how sorry I am."
Even when taking on the guises of God and
Ireland, of course, O'Connor seems to be singing
about herself. When she writes, the music flows
from some deep, hidden spring. "I don't ever sit
down and try to write songs," she says. "I believe
they write themselves and that they're in the air
and in your soul. I start hearing them inside
myself, and I don't make any effort; I just walk
around for a month or so and let the song sing
itself inside of me and then usually it's complete
before I try and sit down to work out the chords."
But back to the question of the day: What's the
deal with her becoming a priest?
"If you're going to put yourself in the position of
criticizing something, then you must feel that you
can do a better job," she says. "Well, if you feel
you could do a better job, then join the
organization and do what you can to change it. I
do believe in not throwing the baby out with the
bathwater. There are things that need to be
cleaned out within the church, but underneath all
of that there's a beautiful baby, this beautiful
truth."
She says her priest name is Mother Bernadette
Mary. And, she adds, her exact title is now
archdeacon. "Basically, I do all the things that
other priests do, allowing for the fact that I have
two children," she says. "Obviously my children
come first. So I do what I can. [But] I don't do
marriages. The reason I don't do marriages is
that people tend to want me to do them because
I'm a pop star. It's the Al Green
syndrome--everyone wants Al Green to marry
them because he's Al Green."
So is she celibate?
"I have a huge calling toward celibacy, which will
probably ultimately be the way I'll go," says
O'Connor. "Obviously I am a very sexual person,
and that's why it's a struggle." O'Connor opens
up her jacket to reveal her sleek figure. "I do
insist on wearing very feminine and feminine-cut
priest gear," she says. "And I don't feel that
being celibate means I have to cut off my
sexuality, because that's my life force."
O'Connor says No Man's Woman, the first single
off her new album, is actually about celibacy. A
few other songs, however, deal boldly with love
and lust. On Daddy I'm Fine, O'Connor cries out
about feeling "sexy underneath the lights" and
yearning to have sex with "every man in sight."
Her newfound calling clearly hasn't dampened her
rock-'n'-roll spirit. O'Connor may be a priest, but
she's no nun.
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