Rememberings

by Sinéad O'Connor

When I asked him, my granddad said Scamp is my nickname because a scamp is a rascal, a bold thing, and I’m the boldest of all my mother’s children.

Nickname is Scamp!

Once we’d been kissing for a while, though, it became apparent that the “whole enchilada” was required.

Pretty naive. Even for a 14 year virgin

She’s having an affair with the singer from the Fine Young Cannibals. Apparently he is fine and young and having her for breakfast, dinner, and tea.

Some serious gossip here!

Many’s the time I confessed to doing something I hadn’t done so that she wouldn’t beat John for it. I’d take the beating instead.

I love him very much and I regret all the years I didn’t speak with him because I was young and stupid. I would advise any young person not to do what I did. Time passes quickly and you can’t get it back.

What wisdom!

I didn’t want to be a housewife. I didn’t like what I’d seen of it. I hated cooking. And besides, I wanted to sleep with more than one man.

So hilarious!

I signed for seven points, which means you get paid 7 percent of what your records sell and you pay for pretty much everything to do with recording and promoting and touring out of that 7 percent.

An awful record deal.

I hate Christmas. I feel pain in my soul like someone drove a tree through my chest.

I can relate!!!

I wrote a song called “Troy,” about my mother and about the minister. I did the demo vocal in Chris’s house. I made him stand outside the door. When I let him back in, he was really shaken. He said he’d never heard anything like it or the volume of it. He made me play it over and over.

As I said, we liked them, we did. They were nice guys, but you know, they had girlfriends, and as we say in the music business, on tour doesn’t count.

I found the touring experience of sitting around in hotel rooms all day quite lonely.

I was crying about my mother being dead. I’m still really messed up about it, even though I’m twenty-four. A little embarrassing. But there you go. I’m a girl.

She still loved her mom when she cried during the nothing compares 2 u video

Appropriately, the moment I’d heard, I was sitting on a toilet (I can’t remember whose) with the door open as usual (for the purposes of easy chat).

When single and album went #1

pieces. I yell, “Fight the real enemy!” (I’m talking to those who are gonna kill Terry.) And I blow out the candle.

So misunderstood

Most musicians love weed because it turns up the music inside you and helps you cope with all the hanging around doing nothing, it being the case that weed makes doing nothing interesting. Hotels, dressing rooms, buses, airports, working two and a half hours of the day, the rest spent relentlessly waiting.

Please be aware that every album represents a diary and each song is a chapter in that diary. And

Why she did not talk about her songs or albums in tnis book

In the first track, “Feel So Different,” I’m actually talking to my mother.

The huge single from the album, my cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was a song I was always—and am always—singing to my mother. Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again. There’s a belief that she’s there, that she can hear me and I can connect to her. It’s why I’ve cried on the line “All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.” I love the song and never get fed up singing it.

When I lived in London and made my first two albums, I sang in an American accent. I sang like all of the people I idolized. I never sang like just me.

One of the reasons I’m so proud of Universal Mother is that the Edge from U2 said he could listen to it only once, it was so personal.

“Thank You for Hearing Me,” the final song on Universal Mother, I wrote about breaking up with Peter Gabriel. I had had an on-and-off fling with him in which I was basically weekend pussy—that would be the kindest way to describe it.

Because to be a good Catholic, you had to think you were a piece of shit. That was the idea. The less you thought of yourself, the more God would think of you.

Why I am not catholic...

I HAVE FOUR CHILDREN by four different fathers, only one of whom I married, and I married three other men, none of whom are the fathers of my children.