Sunday Times June 11, 2000 RECORD OF THE WEEK Mark Edwards SINEAD O'CONNOR. Faith and Courage. ANY PSYCHIATRIST will tell you that if a patient discusses his problems in public, he won't ever get rid of them. I don't understand the theory, but would offer Woody Allen as Exhibit A. I'd like to propose a parallel theory: that the more a songwriter discusses his or her problems in public, the less interesting their songwriting becomes. Exhibit A in this case is Sinead O'Connor. The extraordinary (and clearly inaccurately titled) I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was one of the best albums of the 1990s. Then O'Connor started acting things out in public, and all the emotional energy that originally went into her songs was dissipated. Her life was fascinating; her songs disposable. Recently she's shut up. (Yes, I know she's become a priest, but she didn't go shouting about it. And even the music press had difficulty reconciling her efforts to keep Shane MacGowan alive with her "mad Sinead" image.) So, according to my theory, Faith and Courage ought to constitute a remarkable return to form. And it does. Everything that once made Sinead special is here: the passion, the emotional rawness, the lyrics that tear you apart and the voice that puts you back together again. There's a star-studded cast of producers - Brian Eno, Adrian Sherwood, Wyclef Jean - but you won't notice them. You'll be transfixed by songs such as Daddy I'm Fine. A tale of teenage rebellion, it has all the fire of the I Don't Want songs ("I wanna f*** every man in sight"); the difference, 10 years on, is that it ends not in defiance but in resolution: "Daddy, I'm fine. And Daddy, I love you." If you're a father or a daughter, tears will well up when she sings that. One word of warning. If you prefer your music without a spiritual element, you won't like this album. But then, if you prefer your music without a spiritual element, you're rather missing the point of the exercise. Chat.