Sinéad O’Connoris back on the road, just as her name is back in the headlines.
On her first U.S. tour since 2013, which brought the 53-year-old Irish singer-songwriter to August Hall in San Francisco for a sold-out performance on Friday, Feb. 7, O’Connor found reminders of her past when House SpeakerNancy Pelositore up the State of the Union speech on live television earlier in the week, reviving images of O’Connor doing the same with a picture of the pope when she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992.
But if there were any parallels to be drawn between their public acts of defiance, O’Connor didn’t care to go there. She’s determinedly grasping for normality after a turbulent decade or two that saw her battlingmental health issues,canceling toursand, in 2017,threatening suicidevia a heartbreaking 12-minute video posted on Facebook — and politics clearly don’t figure into the equation.
O’Connor’s San Francisco concert was a lesson in restraint.
With no support act, the singer and her band took the stage promptly at 8:30 p.m. and sent everyone streaming for the exit doors by 9:45 p.m. She uttered a few thanks under her breath, thought of a joke but decided not to tell it, and smiled guilelessly through it all. It was a far cry from the angsty young woman with the shaven-head who appeared in the video for the Prince-penned hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990.
On Friday, O’Connor took the stage barefoot in a hijab and floor-length dress, having converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada Davitt (she still performs under her birth name). Swaying gently from side to side, it was only when she tore into the music that her sentiments came surging forth.
She opened the set with an unexpectedly boisterous cover of John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark,” singing, “I wanted to change the world/ But I could not even change my underwear/ And when the s— got really, really out of hand.”
In “Jealous,” a song from 2000, she sang with tremendous delicacy, “I don’t deserve to be so lonely/ I don’t deserve to cry.” And in a revived “Thank You for Hearing Me,” which was originally released in 1994, she repeated the lines, “Thank you for loving me/ Thank you for seeing me/ And for not leaving me/ Thank you for staying with me.”
她的声音不断深化和天气ed with age, giving extra heft to those old lines that now seem oddly prescient. Yet the mood remained light despite the constant pleas for love, freedom and redemption that are woven into the music, with her young band offsetting the darkness with a soulful Irish lilt.
But when O’Connor hit a block of songs from 1990’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” the album that sold millions and made her an icon, there was no constraining the fire. She performed “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” a capella to startling effect, while “Black Boys on Mopeds,” with its message of police brutality, rang with renewed anger.
Her faithful rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song she long ago threatened to retire after falling out withPrince, sent a shiver through the room — its power undiluted 30 years after O’Connor first recorded it.
For a few minutes, O’Connor gave the audience all the drama and heartbreak it craved.