Sinéad O'Connor, legendary Irish singer-songwriter, dies at 56
Sinéad O'Connor, the legendary Irish singer-songwriter best known for her hit cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U," has died, her family has confirmed. She was 56. The Irish Times also reported the news.
In a statement to Irish public service broadcaster RTE, the singer's family announced: "It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time."
Representatives for O'Connor did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.
A cause of death has not been revealed at this time. However, O'Connor has been open about her struggle with mental illness throughout her life.
In her 35-year career, O'Connor sold millions of records and released one of the most famous music videos of all time. Yet she may best be remembered as one of pop's most fearless voices, one who spoke openly about her personal struggles with mental health and abuse and never shied away from controversy with her uncensored, and at times unpopular, opinions. She routinely criticized the Catholic Church and its handling of sexual abuse accusations. In 1992, she tore up a photo of the Pope during her guest performance on Saturday Night Live, a move that dogged her career and her relationship with the media for the rest of her life.
"The 10 years after that Saturday Night Live performance, the way that I was dealt with was shocking," she told EW in 2021. "It was the fashion to treat me bad, whether you were in my bed, at a board meeting, a TV show, a gig, or a party. Everybody treated me like I was a crazy bitch cos I ripped up the Pope's picture. We know I'm a crazy bitch, but that's not why."
In 1991, she boycotted the Grammys despite winning the award for Best Alternative Music Performance for "Nothing Compares 2 U." In 1990, after she threatened to cancel a concert if the venue played the U.S. National Anthem before her set, Frank Sinatra said he wanted to "kick her ass." But O'Connor wore controversy like a badge of honor. "I don't do anything in order to cause trouble," she told NME in 1991. "It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble. I'm proud to be a troublemaker."
In that same 2021 conversation with EW, O'Connor discussed her difficult relationship with the music industry and its disregard for artists with mental health issues. "Music is always under attack. The industry is so frightened of music that they want to silence it. The industry was frightened of me," said O' Connor. "The industry asked: 'What do we do with her? Well, she's very strong so we can't kill her. The next best thing is to make it look like she's crazy. We'll hurt her so bad that nobody will want to risk doing anything she did because they wouldn't wanna get the kicking.'"
O'Connor revealed to Oprah in 2007 that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (she said later that it was an incorrect diagnosis). In 2015, she underwent a radical hysterectomy, which led to multiple suicide attempts.
Her mental health was a lifelong challenge that she addressed candidly, often sharing her struggles on social media. In 2015, O'Connor wrote what many believed to be a suicide note on Facebook, saying she had intentionally overdosed at a hotel following several days of fighting with family members, though she was later found safe. In 2017, she posted a video to Facebook, saying she was suicidal. "Suddenly, all the people who are supposed to be loving you or taking care of you treat you like s---," said O'Connor, adding that she had three mental illnesses. In 2020, she tweeted that she would be delaying any scheduled performances until 2022 while she entered rehab for trauma and addiction. A year later, she announced that she would be retiring from the music industry, with her upcoming album NVDA set to be her last.
O'Connor had a public health crisis in 2022, following the death of her 17-year-old son Shane. She published a series of tweets, writing, "There is no point living without him. Everything I touch, I ruin. I only stayed for him. And now he's gone." Shane, her son with Irish singer Donal Lunny, was found on Jan. 7 after being put on suicide watch. O'Connor later updated followers that she was on her way to the hospital to get help but said this was just a delay in reuniting with her son. In a tribute posted to Twitter, she shared a link to Bob Marley's song "Ride Natty Ride" and wrote, "This is for my Shaney. The light of my life. The lamp of my soul. My blue-eye baby. You will always be my light. We will always be together. No boundary can separate us."
O'Connor was born in Glenageary, Ireland, just outside Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. Her childhood was tumultuous: After her parents split when she was 8 years old, she went to live with her mother, whom O'Connor would later claim was physically and emotionally abusive. (O'Connor's mother died in a car accident in 1985.) As a teenager, O'Connor attended Catholic school but ended up in one of Ireland's notorious laundries after she was repeatedly caught shoplifting, something she said her mother encouraged her to do. O'Connor later went to boarding school, but she dropped out and moved to Dublin after forming a band with a musician she met through an ad she placed in a magazine. Following the death of her mother in 1985, O'Connor left the band and moved to London, where she began a solo career.
Her first album, 1987's The Lion and the Cobra, brought her modest acclaim and a Grammy nomination. Yet it was the follow-up, 1990's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, that turned her into an international superstar thanks to her cover of an obscure Prince song, "Nothing Compares 2 U," which he originally wrote for his side project the Family in 1985. The Purple One reportedly was not a fan of O'Connor's version. According to her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, and interviews she gave, Prince summoned O'Connor to his house not long after the song's release and told her to stop swearing in interviews. When she told him to "f--- off," the encounter allegedly turned physical, and O'Connor said she had to escape his house in the early hours of the morning.
O'Connor told EW in 2021 that she never considered removing the song from her repertoire despite the altercation. "The song wasn't his, it was mine," she said. "It's my song. It never crossed my mind before I met him, or after. I never heard him sing it before I recorded it. I didn't associate it with him at all."
The accompanying video for "Nothing Compares 2 U" would become one of music's most iconic. The clip, which featured O'Connor singing directly to the camera as tears streamed down her face, won Video of the Year at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards — the first time a female artist took home the night's top prize. Critics have hailed the single as one of pop's finest breakup anthems, but O'Connor said she was actually drawing on her complicated relationship with her mother during the video's emotional performance. "I always think of my mother [with that song]… which is why I had a little tear in the video,"she once told the BBC. "My mother died when I was 17 and it wasn't long after that that I was making the video."
O'Connor would never have another hit that matched that song's success, but she continued to seize the spotlight in the 1990s. Her next album, 1992's Am I Not Your Girl?, was a collection of jazz standards that helped yield another defining image of O'Connor. During an appearance on Saturday Night Live one month after the album's release, she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while covering Bob Marley's "War" as a protest against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. More than 4,000 people called NBC to complain about the incident. Joe Pesci, who hosted the show the following week, said during his monologue that he would have given her "such a smack." Even the queen of controversy herself, Madonna, thought O'Connor crossed a line, telling The Irish Times, "There is a better way to present her ideas than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people."
While the rest of the '90s were quieter for O'Connor, the early 2000s marked a period of both musical experimentation and major changes in her personal life. 2000's Faith and Courage saw O'Connor collaborate with Wyclef Jean and Brian Eno, while 2002's Sean-Nós Nua was a collection of traditional Irish songs. Around 2002, she began suffering from fibromyalgia and planned to retire from music, though O'Connor later said her experience with the pain condition was "a gift" that helped open her mind up to pursuing other genres of music: Her next record, 2005's Throw Down Your Arms, was a reggae album that she recorded in Jamaica and released on her own record label. It was also during this period that O'Connor gave birth to her two youngest children.
O'Connor's final two records, 2012's How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? and 2014's I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss, earned positive reviews, but it wasn't her music that kept her in the headlines. In 2013, after Miley Cyrus cited the "Nothing Compares 2 U" video as an inspiration for her "Wrecking Ball" video, O'Connor wrote the young pop star an open letter and warned her about being "prostituted" by the musical industry. "I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way 'cool' to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos," O'Connor wrote.
O'Connor's letter was widely criticized, but her message may have been misunderstood — O'Connor wasn't anti-sexuality, just anti-exploitation and anti-manipulation. She told EW in 2012 that she came up with the title How About I Be Me (And You Be You) after she was castigated for a series of articles she wrote about women's sexuality in an Irish newspaper. "If you're an Irish woman you're not supposed to be open about certain things, you're not meant to talk about certain things, you don't challenge certain things," she said. "I don't really need to be told, at 45 years of age, by a bunch of sexually repressed adults."
Still, Cyrus' response — she tweeted a screenshot of O'Connor begging for a therapist and medication on Twitter in 2011 and compared her to Amanda Bynes — set O'Connor on the warpath. She wrote three more impassioned open letters to Cyrus, but by the following year she would look back on the exchange as an important dialogue between two artists. "What was more important that came out of the Miley thing was being able to conversate about mental health and human rights," O'Connor told Time in 2013. "The two of us, without meaning to, did quite a good job."
That incident in 2011 wasn't the only time the public got a glimpse of O'Connor's personal demons. Over the years she has spoken openly about depression. In 1999, she ended a bitter custody battle with John Waters, the father of her daughter, Roisin, after a suicide attempt; she has said she made another attempt later that year just before her 33rd birthday.
Despite her well-publicized struggles, O'Connor told EW in 2012 that she hoped fans would take away a sense of joy from her music and her frankness about the dark times in her life. "My records… are diaries, and if you listen from beginning through, you will hear a journey," she said. "It was a journey towards happiness. There are certain artists… that are on a journey but they never got to joy. I was determined I was getting there."
In 2021, O'Connor announced (and then retracted) her retirement, saying she was planning for a 2022 release of her next studio album, NVDA, to be her last. O'Connor postponed the album following the death of her son in 2022. Her final music release was a recording of "The Skye Boat Song," a rendition that served as the soundtrack for the opening title sequence of season 7 of Outlander.
She continued to stay in the public eye, releasing her memoir, Rememberings, which generated immense media attention and was named one of the best books of the year by BBC Culture.
The musician was also the subject of the acclaimed documentary Nothing Compares, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022. The movie, directed by Kathryn Ferguson, charted O'Connor's life and career — her childhood abuse and various scandals, but also her groundbreaking music. "As an intimate, often infuriating portrait of an artist and era, it's hard to argue with the raw power of the story on screen — and the timeliness of it too, no matter how long overdue," EW wrote in our review.
O'Connor is survived by three children: Jake, 34, her son with music producer and former collaborator John Reynolds; Roisin, 26, her daughter with Irish Journalist John Waters; and Yeshua, 15, her son with Frank Bonadio. She is also survived by a grandson by her son Jake and his girlfriend Lia. O'Connor was most recently married to Barry Herridge. They wed in 2011 and announced their split 17 days later, only to reunite in 2012.
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