I will sing in peace

We lost a tremendous talent and a force of nature this week when Sinéad O’Connor died at 56. Couse of death was not immediately known.

O’Connor’s four-decade career was marked by controversy, as often happens when a woman choses to speak her mind. In a 1992 guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, she sang an acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War” and then ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest rampant sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. The furor was incandescent, as this was about 10 years before media pulled the scab off that global festering wound.

But furor didn’t bother her, as she explained:

The woman had a brass pair, she did.

Recent times were emotionally difficult for her and she was shattered by the death by suicide 18 months ago of her youngest son, Shane. But she was working on a new album to be released next year.

Here she is singing “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Sink into that voice and those eyes.