In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The anthology Nothing Compares to You powerfully examines the influence and impact of Sinéad O’Connor’s music and activism on its female and non-binary contributing writers.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“A vivid and multifaceted ode to a trailblazing musician.”
In her own words, here is Sonya Huber’s Book Notes music playlist for the anthology Nothing Compares to You:
The new anthology Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us (One Signal, 2025), edited by Martha Bayne and me, started as a free-for-all on Facebook, prompted by my offhand comment in August 2023 that we should do an essay collection celebrating the legendary musician, songwriter, and activist who had passed away a few days before. I wanted to claim “my” song, “Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” and to take apart my relationship to it, but I didn’t realize how widespread this feeling was. I learned that many, many people have a favorite Sinéad song, one that speaks to an era or a turning point in their lives, and I think there’s something about Sinéad’s fierce honesty that allowed listeners to connect deeply with her work. In putting together the anthology, the process of weighing claims to songs left us with a few songs given to writers who then couldn’t make the deadline work, and many other songs where we had to say no to fantastic writers and essays because someone had called dibs. These are the songs that got away.
- “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—This is a song that got away from the collection, was claimed but the essay wasn’t written. It’s one of my favorites because of the autobiographical details in the lyrics, including an argument in the aftermath of giving birth (“you know how it is and how a pregnancy can change you”) and the desire to sit and write (“All I want to do is just sit here and write it all down, rest for a while.”) Like so many of O’Connor’s songs, it transitions from honesty in a relationship to the impact of saying the unsaid on a political or social level. It might be the perfect soundtrack for this year as a commentary on various wannabe emperors, and I love the refrain, “I will sleep with a clear conscience. I will sleep in peace.”
- “Success has Made a Failure of our Home,” Am I Not Your Girl?—This is a cover of a song written by Johnny Mullins and originally recorded by Loretta Lynn. The horns and intro sound very James Bond-ish, like there’s a mystery Sinéad is unraveling as she hunts for a villain, and that turns out to be accurate. The refrain at the end of the song—“Am I not your girl?”—seems to ask the world what happened after she ripped up the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 and was summarily cast out of the limelight. A wreckage of horns and vocals also sounds like a commentary on child abuse, as if she would ask her mother the same question.
- “In This Heart,” Universal Mother—Back in the days of cassettes, you’d dub someone’s copy of an album with a double-tape player, hitting record and then go do something else. Often after you’d grabbed your cassette and given the original back to your friend, you’d play the first time and realize you got only half a song at the end. This happened with my copy of Universal Mother, so for years in my head and on my radio this song stopped short into silence, which somehow made it more haunting and elusive, an acapella song about longing and grief that breaks my heart on every listen.
- “Haunted,” Single—Goddamn, this is so good: a layered duet with Pogues frontman Shane McGowan that seems, to me, to tell the story of their long friendship now that both have passed on and they are hopefully haunting each other. Sinéad’s voice sparkles against Shane McGowan’s growl, which is shaggy enough to be perfect. Originally recorded for the “Sid and Nancy” soundtrack in 1995, the version with Sinead was released as a single in 2014. Bonus track is another duet with McGowan, “Fairytale of New York,” a live performance on Top of the Pops 1995 that is my favorite Christmas carol.
- “Fire on Babylon,” Universal Mother—I am partial to Sinéad’s barn-burning, scorched-earth energy, so this thrumming meditation on her mother threaded with her enraged and swooping “Fire!” refrain paired with “Oh yes a change has come” makes it perfect for shout-singing in the car and fighting the power. I challenge anyone in the world to write a better jazzy, catchy refrain about child abuse.
- “No Man’s Woman,” Faith and Courage—The title of a 1955 police movie about an evil “free spirit” woman everyone wanted to murder, Sinéad owns the title and obliterates its previous connotations with a poppy hip-hop anthem to a woman who knows her own mind, singing that love has broken her and she’s looking past it because “I’ve got other work I want to get done.” The turn at the end of the song talks her relationship to a man who’s a spirit and won’t break her heart.
- “Take Me to Church,” I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss—I keep thinking about Hozier’s song of the same name when I hear this, and weirdly they seem to have both been recorded in 2013. He says in a video paying tribute to her, “I’ve had to reckon with the fact that I’m walking roads that in many ways she paved.” Her song of the same name contrasts with his, offering a sort of joyous incantation, “I don’t want to love that way no more/what have I been writing love songs for,” saying she wants to write “songs that mend broken bones/and that don’t leave you alone.” It sounds like a response to Hozier’s, to me, and a sketch for a mission statement of a new kind of church.
- “Dense Water Deeper Down,” I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss—Lord do I love Sinéad’s contradictions. In the same albums as “Take Me to Church” where she’s swearing off love songs, she writes this one, a stompy, sexy, and sweet song with an R&B guitar hook in which she sings, “He makes me forget everything my mother warned.” And since it’s a Sinéad song, it’s about loss and longing, ending with “And he’s the only love I missed.” I love this take on the saying “Still waters run deep,” and the lure of a thoughtful partner who sometimes turns, of course, to be a moody asshole.
- “Just Call Me Joe,” The Lion and the Cobra—This grungy gender-bender from 1987 begins with a cycling set of guitar notes (and it’s frustrating that musical phrase seems to evoke another alternative song from the same era that I can’t remember), followed by an almost-whispered request that she not be called “mister” or “lady,” “sweetheart,” or “baby,” addressed to a “you” whose gender we also don’t know. In the 1980s Sinéad was saying things that many of us didn’t feel we had a right to think yet, and the song evokes for me all the Joes and Jo’s that were helping me imagine my non-binary self, from the Jo March of Little Women to motorcycle-riding Jo Polniaczek from the TV series “Facts of Life.” The second-best thing about this song is the strange set of fuzzed-out recorded lyrics that supposedly end with the phrases, “Listen to what I’m not saying over and over/I feel as if some traveller returned.”
- “Just Like U Said it Would B,” The Lion and the Cobra—This meditation on confidence and love is a portrait of what Sinead has given us: a kind of personal incantation, so that in singing along with her, we get to channel a perspective that is so rarely included in a song. She walks in a garden, she walks off stage, and she’s gonna “learn how to run with the big boys.” She ran way past them.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Sonya Huber’s Book Notes playlist for her memoir Cover Me
Sonya Huber is an award-winning author of eight books. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Fourth Genre, and more. She received the 2012 Creative Nonfiction Award from Terrain; her essays were named notable in Best American Essays 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2019.