nothing compares
💔
Welcome to the Sunday post.
Admitting there are songs I’m afraid to listen to because of how they make me feel is like, ugh.
I’ve described this in numerous interviews: how music is like a drug to me. So naturally I’d need to be extra conscientious about what I listen to. But why on earth is a person who is a writer, and a therapist—drifting into, sitting with, entering through, and observing feelings constantly—sometimes afraid to feel?, I wonder.
It’s funny to me that I posted the above the day before we learned of the passing of Sinead O’Connor. I was referencing an altogether different song, but when I first heard that Sinead O’Connor was gone, I thought of her widely known and recognized “Nothing Compares 2 U” because it’s a song I have never let myself listen to in its entirety. Her rendition of the lyrics written by Prince was also not a song I ever connected with a person, time, or place, which is usually how and why specific songs overpower my senses.
Like, “Nothing Compares 2 U” was not the same as TV On The Radio’s “Careful You” which I associate with a time and place in my mind. It’s also a song I can listen to over and over and it feels good and difficult, a sharp needle prodding at my gums. I went back this week to listen to Radiohead’s “Kid A”—the whole album which I associate with my Hollywood apartment and the year 2002. I was pleased to learn it has nowhere near the same effect on me it once did. I did not sob or feel thrown into a humid, dark hole. I just recognize it as an album that had a perfect ratio of pleasure to pain for me, for some time.
So why had I not been able to listen to the song “Nothing Compares 2 U” in its entirety?
I’ve fantasized before of speaking with someone educated in the science of music who can explain to me why certain chord shifts and octaves and tones can be the same ones I look for in other music, and why they make my body and consciousness shift. Can this person tell me why I want to thrash cry when I listen to these songs, so much so that I try to avoid the songs?
In the hours after learning of Sinead’s passing, I had to jump off social media. The tributes and mourning, some beautiful, were making me sink into an abyss. She was 56. I am sensitive to women in their 50s suddenly dying. I thought back to the profile I’d read about her in 2021 in the New York Times.
When I’d read it, I had been reading it as someone who was curious about a powerful and magnetic artist. I had never called myself a fan of O’Connor’s—my admiration was something more abstract. I was, like millions of people, transfixed and energized by her appearance on SNL. I hadn’t listened to her albums. My association to her music was mainly through radio play. And, of course, “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
The song itself felt inescapable for a time and when I first heard the opening to the song in 1990 or 1991, my body … just went … Oh no.
The lyrics by themselves are understood to be from the perspective of someone in the wake of a break-up, maybe someone who has been broken up with.
I have been broken up with once in my life. As the person who did most of the ‘breaking’ it has never made sense to me that I could be so affected by this song. But it was not only the lyrics that I’ve avoided.
It’s Sinead’s voice that, when I heard it, made me want to stop everything, a dark wave headed toward me, the fear of getting lost in the undertow.
I admitted to a few people in my life in the days right after her passing that I had never let myself listen the song in its entirety. Anytime I find it on satellite radio I’ve passed it by. So of course, now, I had to listen to it. Multiple times.
The sense of choosing to disconnect.
My sense of choosing to disconnect from feelings as aroused by music.
Is it disconnect or is it self-care?
We all know how harsh it can be to stay in the present. I can have a little disconnect, a little disassociation, as a treat.
After having listened to “Nothing Compares 2 U” several times in succession, the simple answer is I’m overwhelmed by the sublime combination of her voice and the music. And I’m okay. I didn’t lose myself or my footing scaling down into the mournful reaches of the song.
My sensitivity to the passing of this force who we knew on this plane as Sinead O’Connor is also strongly related to how she was treated while alive. This Instagram post by Hanif Abdurraqib captures this, and the state of crisis we’re all in.
Divinity of voice, powerful truth-teller, I will carry you in my heart—the elder incarnation of you, and the younger spirit that lived within, the one we were first introduced to. Rest in Power, Sinéad O'Connor.