In June 1997, Sinéad O’Connor released Gospel Oak, a brief collection that stands among her finest work—and easily her most hopeful. “I’m finally on top of the hill, and I can see the other side,” she said upon its release, “whereas before I was right down the bottom.” The EP includes personal mantras that seemed to write themselves (“This Is to Mother You,” “I Am Enough for Myself”) and political messages that play like love songs (“This Is a Rebel Song,” “Petit Poulet”). The sense you got was an artist who, having used her art as an outlet for rage and sorrow and self-immolation for a decade at that point, had developed a more nourishing perspective that she wanted to share with her audience. She named the record, fittingly, for the neighborhood where her therapist’s office was located.
In a catalog best known for its unflinching ballads about heartbreak and grief, Gospel Oak is the music I have returned to most by O’Connor, an artist whose astounding voice and painfully honest songwriting have always been weighted by the context surrounding them, even before her death this week at the age of 56. There might be no figure in popular music whose messages were so frequently and violently misunderstood, a fact that applies as much to her underrated back catalog as it does to her more commonly discussed controversies in the public eye.
Part of the reason for these misunderstandings is O’Connor’s own self-deprecating, and often self-defeating, tendencies. She hated stardom, and not in the sense of a celebrity who treated engaging with the press as a necessary evil. She was a genuine outsider whose strange, vulnerable career might have made more sense in a quieter setting, a sanctuary for which she was always searching. In this regard, her peers were never pop icons like Madonna—with whom she butted heads in the ’90s—or Prince, whose admiration for her only seemed to complicate their turbulent interactions. Instead, I see her more like Elliott Smith, if audiences expected him to wear the white tuxedo he donned at the Oscars at every show, or Cat Power, if each shaky live set was subject to tabloid scrutiny.
