The essential playlist of Sinead O’Connor

From the moment her debut album ‘The Lion and the Cobra’ dropped in 1987, Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor— who passed away recently — flaunted raw passion and raw nerve.

The inflections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice. She drew on punk, dance music, and seething orchestral arrangements in her debut album when she was only 20. She would go on to work with reggae, big-band music and more.

Sinead’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as she sang about love, death, power and her place in the world.

A throwback to her iconic songs:

‘Mandinka’ (1987)

With a distorted, three-chord rock stomp, Sinead announces, “I don’t know no shame/I feel no pain’, landing hard on dissonant notes. The song seesaws between refusal and acceptance.

‘Troy’ (1987)

Backed by a string ensemble, the song underlines every churning emotion: memories, accusations, confessions, vows, pleas, warnings and the sheer desperation when Sinead sings ‘Does she hold you like I do?’.

‘I want your (hands on me)’ (1987)

Chattering, percussive funk carries this call for physical pleasure, and as she bounces her voice against the syncopated beat, Sinead summons unabashed rasps and moans.

‘Nothing compares 2 U’ (1990)

Sinead’s commercial peak commandeered a song Prince wrote for his band, the Family. She makes her voice small and bereft, then lashes out at consolations; she places Celtic turns at the ends of phrases. And she brings crucial changes to Prince’s melody, making upward leaps when the chorus gets to the line ‘Nothing compares to you’.

‘I am stretched on your grave’ (1990)

A hip-hop beat backs an old Irish poem that was translated into English and turned into a song about the death of a lover. Sinead’s voice is otherworldly. A fiddle arrives near the end, completing the mesh of traditional and contemporary.

‘The last day of our acquaintance’ (1990)

The formal mechanics of a divorce — ‘I will meet you later in somebody’s office’ — can’t contain the bitterness of the situation. For most of the song, Sinead sings over two calmly strummed acoustic guitar chords, but agitation rises in her voice, and when a band kicks in behind her there’s no mistaking her fury.

‘You made me the thief of your heart’ (1994)

This incantatory rocker sounds like Sinead fronting 1990s U2 — with a pealing piano and an implacable beat — it draws the best from both, with U2’s echoey depths, her primal peaks and the high-stakes dynamics they both thrived on.