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      Why Are Dave Matthews Band Fans So Loyal?

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      On an afternoon in June while wildfire smoke enveloped Manhattan, people lined up outside Irving Plaza — some before dawn, some sporting face masks, some fresh off red-eye flights — to see Dave Matthews. That night, the 56-year-old balladeer was playing a rare solo gig celebrating his namesake band’s new album, “Walk Around the Moon.”Josh Roberts, 42, a special-education teacher in Las Vegas, who has seen the Dave Matthews Band, or DMB, 523 times, stood in that line. Mr. Roberts estimates that he has spent $100,000 on tickets and travel since discovering the band as a struggling high school junior in 1995. “This band has songs about love, depression, sex, things that you connect to,” he said.Mr. Matthews is the first to admit he doesn’t always get it right. “I’ve written lots of terrible lyrics,” he declared at the Four Seasons hotel in TriBeCa the next day, scanning a printout of a song generated by ChatGPT in the style of DMB. He cringed and added, “I would never say, ‘Grab my guitar, strumming with all my might.’”Still, plucking his guitar with abandon is exactly what Mr. Matthews has done since 1991, when DMB established itself in Charlottesville, Va. DMB is the second-largest ticket-seller in the world, according to the trade publication Pollstar, which tracked the top touring artists of the last 40 years. Mr. Matthews believes that curiosity “about how to write a good song” may be one reason his band has stayed in the spotlight for more than three decades, attracting hundreds of thousands of concertgoers on their 45-stop summer 2023 tour.Yet, the band’s ardent fan base contrasts with its paradoxical pop-culture standing: In 2020, the Dave Matthews Band was nominated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for induction and was entered into a public voting contest, which the group won. The band, however, did not garner enough support from the organization’s voting committee and was not included in the nominees list for the next three years.With more than 30 years in the music industry, Dave Matthews knows you can’t please everyone. “If you make stuff, some people will like it, and some people won’t,” he said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesFor a certain set of music enthusiasts born between 1970 to 2000, DMB is synonymous with summer. “When this time comes, I can’t wait for it. It’s the kid in me,” Mr. Roberts said on a follow-up call during a 17-hour drive from Wisconsin to New Hampshire to see two more DMB shows. “I have more friends through DMB than I do through high school and college.”Since 1992, the band, or some iteration of it, has toured relentlessly from Memorial Day to “Labor Dave Weekend” and beyond (except in 2020, because of the pandemic). Superfans routinely follow DMB around for regional legs of tours. Many have seen hundreds of shows, displaying a band-as-religion level fandom with tattoos, license plates and jewelry professing their piety.Coupled with DMB’s taping-friendly policy (fans are allowed to audio record shows with professional equipment) and its hippie reputation, the band’s music frequently gets lumped together with the Grateful Dead and Phish.A lot of “Deadheads,” as the Grateful Dead fans affectionately call themselves, either gravitated toward DMB or Phish when the band’s lead songwriter, Jerry Garcia, died in 1995, said Jeff Travitz, 61, a franchise development manager in Downingtown, Pa., who has taped over 100 DMB concerts. The bands are each unique, he said, but they filled the same “major void” to meet up with friends, tape shows and trade recordings.“I don’t think too much about what we replaced,” Mr. Matthews said. Still, he understands the Phish comparison. In general, he thinks ’90s music critics dismissed improvisation, which, as far as he is concerned, is the only quality these groups share. “We all got thrown into the same category, even though we’re all different,” he said. “What do they call it? Jam bands?”Whatever it’s labeled, fans have gone to great lengths for DMB. In 1998, the band launched the Warehouse, its official fan association, which allows members to pre-order tickets before the public, enter contests and access a message board. “I literally stole my mom’s credit card to join,” Mr. Roberts, the teacher, said. He now spearheads a Facebook group of about 850 DMB followers. Multiple times a tour, he will buy extra pit tickets, which cost about $50 to $150, with his own money and distribute them among the group at face value to combat scalping. (Mr. Matthews, too, laments the current business of ticketing: “I think half the profits that the ticket brokers make should be given back to the theaters, artists or charity, because they make so much money, and they’re really just scalpers.”)Lisa Treat has seen 308 shows, owns a tattoo parlor called Dreaming Tree Ink (named after one of the band’s songs) and tattooed her neck with the band’s fire dancer logo.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesA fan wearing a custom Dave Matthews Band T-shirt.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesRidge Richter, a 35-year-old airline-ramp agent in Columbus, Ohio, who has seen 160 shows, doesn’t have any tattoos himself but runs in a crowd of DMB-saturated limbs. “A lot of people, if they’re crazy enough, if Dave signs their arm at a show, they’ll get a tattoo that day,” said Mr. Richter, who also moonlights as a DMB party planner. For each tour, he has organized six or seven tailgates complete with DMB cover bands.Such fanaticism invites detractors. Many stereotype the fans as pot-smoking, tie-dye touting former fraternity bros fawning over craft beers in parking lots between cornhole games. The pop-culture mockery is especially palpable with DMB. See the “Trepidation of the Dave Matthews Fan” bit from the comedian Marc Maron; the cool factor of Anthony Bourdain snarking their fan base odium; and “Saturday Night Live” skits imitating Mr. Matthews’ distinct warble. (Mr. Matthews says that “Bill Hader might be the best one.”)“I feel like his music is just elevator music” said Jody Harper, 44, a technology executive at an arts nonprofit in Manhattan. “The way I see it, everybody hanging out together at DMB concerts are just a bunch of people that want to hang out in an elevator together.”With more than 30 years in the music industry, Mr. Matthews knows you can’t please everyone. “If you make stuff, some people will like it, and some people won’t,” he said. “I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.” He divulged that even his beloved grandfather didn’t understand his music.He continued: “For people that hate me, I would just say, ‘Ignore me. Don’t waste your time!’”“I have more friends through DMB than I do through high school and college,” said Josh Roberts, who has seen the band 523 times. Mr. Roberts estimated that he has spent $100,000 on tickets and travel since discovering the band.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMr. Matthews attributed the band’s enduring allure, in part, to offering fans a singular experience every night. “I think about people that love our music but aren’t crazy fans,” he said. “I want them to have the best time. And then I want to play music for people that love us deeply. I want to play for everyone.”The group has about 1,100 titles in their catalog and a core rotation of about 275 songs. Set lists vary substantially, and there are guest musicians for a night or two throughout the tour, including Warren Haynes and Brandi Carlile, as well as lesser-known local acts.Mr. Travitz, the manager in Pennsylvania, appreciates that the band covers songs and interpolates snippets of others into its tunes. Some covers include Pink Floyd’s “Money,” Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My.” “It always makes the show fun when they play a song you’re totally not expecting,” Mr. Travitz said.Mr. Matthews said the rapport among members of the band and crew was paramount to DMB’s longevity. When the band is crafting set lists, Mr. Matthews said he prioritized giving “everyone a moment to shine.”The band members’ different ages and backgrounds may also explain their long-lasting appeal, added Mr. Matthews, citing his upbringing in New York, England and South Africa. “We all experienced different versions of the world,” he said. “Great friendships often come from people that have very different experiences.”To broaden his perspective, Mr. Matthews often leans on his children. His 21-year-old twin daughters are either “full of praise where they think it’s deserved” or “they’ll tell me as quickly, ‘This is not a good song’ or ‘I don’t buy those lyrics.’” Mr. Matthews recurrently finds himself asking them and his 16-year-old son about his place in the world from their Generation Z perspective.The band performing in New York this summer.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMeghan Brennan, a 24-year-old customer service manager in Boston, is part of a crop of new admirers and has seen some 50 shows. “I’m definitely one of the younger big fans,” she said, adding that her peers “think that I’m insane for doing what I do, which I am.” Her sister, 18 months her junior, in particular, doesn’t get the obsession. She “just hates how much I like them,” Ms. Brennan said.Traveling to see the band has marked what Ms. Brennan calls a transitional life stage of college and living on her own for the first time. She appreciates the friends she has made at tailgates and preshow meetups from Nashville to Hartford, Conn. Her DMB friends are older and can offer advice from a different perspective, she said.Mr. Matthews’ values also resonate: “He really is vocal about the environment,” Ms. Brennan said. (They are the first band to be designated as a Goodwill Ambassador by The United Nations Environment Programme.)Rob Bokon, a 48-year-old technology consultant in Cincinnati and a co-founder of DMBAlmanac.com, an encyclopedia website for the band, has attended 154 shows in 18 states and 44 venues. For Mr. Bokon, his DMB concert experience is a reflection of his entire career trajectory. When he was young, working as a pizza delivery boy and making minimum wage, Mr. Bokon said he could only afford local shows. He eventually made enough money to attend destination shows, but he and his friends couldn’t afford hotel rooms, so they would often drive six hours back home after concerts, “sometimes in the snow, sometimes on two-lane roads,” he said. Of course, DMB poured out of the car’s tinny speakers the entire way home. “It was the best.”Mr. Bokon’s fascination began when he started collecting cassettes of the band’s concerts in 1998. He initially tracked DMB’s set lists in spreadsheets but after one of the band’s concerts in Washington in 2001, he and his friend Matías Niño, who is a programmer, decided to build a fan site. That fan site became the Almanac, which is known as, among fans, the band’s de facto encyclopedia.Alexa Miller Hall, a 48-year-old sales executive in Pittsburgh who has seen 164 shows, is used to telling naysayers about the band’s global impact and defending the magic of a DMB show. It never gets old, said Ms. Miller Hall, who saw her first show in 1992, after becoming a passionate tape trader in college. She guesses she has traveled over 100,000 miles and spent nearly $200,000 to see the band, at least $60,000 of that on tickets alone. Coordinating tickets “is like a part-time job,” she said.Karissa Nash wearing a hat with the fire dancer logo.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesA tattoo of Mr. Matthews on the calf of Lisa Treat.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesIn 2012, Ms. Miller Hall met a bassist in a DMB cover band called Grux in the pit at a DMB concert in New Jersey. “We started holding hands” during the show, she said. In 2015, they married. (Meeting partners through message boards, tailgates or concerts is not uncommon; Ms. Miller Hall knows another married couple that met at that same show.)Ms. Miller Hall said the most extreme thing she ever did for the band was camp out during a snowstorm with a group of friends before the band headlined “The Night Before” performance in Minnesota during the Super Bowl in February 2018. To get close to the stage, the group had planned to sleep outside the arena in the freezing temperatures. “Thankfully by the grace of a security guard,” she said, “they let us into the foyer area, and we spent the night with the cigarette butts and gum.”As for Mr. Matthews, his desire to make the best of whatever muck or gold life throws his way can be traced to his father (a scientist he described as “brilliant beyond my understanding”), who died of cancer when he was 10. This is why, he said, “I feel it’s necessary to remind myself of our temporary nature.” While he is unsure whether his father would have liked his music, he thinks he would have appreciated that attitude.Though Mr. Matthews can’t pinpoint exactly why the band has remained so popular, he believes that luck may have played some kind of role. “It’s just what has happened to us, as much as we’ve done it,” he said. “Some worms end up in beautiful, rich, wet soil, and some worms end up on the sidewalk on a hot, sunny day.” More

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      Sinead O’Connor, Prince and the Thrill of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’

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      O’Connor, who was found dead this week, was catapulted to fame when she covered the song written by Prince on her sophomore album.Sinead O’Connor and Prince, passionate singer-songwriters who both died in their mid-50s, were tied together by the plaintive song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which catapulted O’Connor to fame when she recorded it for her sophomore album.Prince had composed the song in 1984, deciding to give it to the Family, a side project featuring the singers Susannah Melvoin and Paul Peterson. But the track never gained much recognition when the band released its self-titled album in 1985.The response was considerably different when O’Connor, working with the Japanese jazz musician Gota Yashiki and the producer Nellee Hooper, recorded a stripped-down version for her 1990 album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.”“Nothing Compares 2 U” became a No. 1 hit in 17 countries, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four straight weeks and helped win O’Connor a Grammy (which she later refused to accept). The track’s popular music video, featuring a close-up of O’Connor’s shaved head and piercing gaze, was itself nominated for a Grammy.“As far as I’m concerned, it’s my song,” O’Connor told The New York Times in 2021.Prince was pleased to see O’Connor’s version become so popular, Melvoin said in an interview this week.“When it hit and it was doing remarkably well, he had a big smile on his face about it.” Melvoin said. “He loved it. At one point later in his life, he was known to say, ‘Thank you for all the beautiful houses, Sinead.’”Peterson said he was so shocked when he first heard O’Connor’s cover over the car radio that he had to pull over.“I didn’t know who she was, and I felt like I had ownership in that song even though I didn’t write it,” he said in an interview. “So I think I was a little disappointed that our version didn’t get out there at the incredible rate that hers did.”At the same time, Peterson said, he feels thrilled that O’Connor’s cover has been so influential. “It’s incredible the amount of people’s lives that song has touched,” he said. “I was just thrilled to be a small part of that”Melvoin said Prince wrote the song both about herself and his housekeeper, Sandy Scipioni, who left the role after her father died. Melvoin and Prince had been intimately involved for years, she said, but were encountering difficulties in their relationship when he wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U.”It took only a short time for Prince to draft the song at his Eden Prairie warehouse studio, Susan Rogers, Prince’s sound engineer, said in Duane Tudahl’s book “Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions.”“I was amazed how beautiful it was,” Rogers told Tudahl. “He took his notebook and he went off to the bedroom, wrote the lyrics very quickly, came back out and sang it.”O’Connor wrote in her memoir, “Rememberings,” that she felt a particular resonance with the lines, “All the flowers that you planted Mama/In the backyard/All died when you went away.”“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,” wrote O’Connor, who was 18 when her mother died in a car crash. “There’s a belief that she’s there, that she can hear me and I can connect to her.”Although “Nothing Compares 2 U” was vital to O’Connor’s career, she grew conflicted about Prince, writing in her memoir about a distressing encounter at his Los Angeles residence.They had first met at a club around the time of O’Connor’s debut album in 1987, she wrote, but did not interact again until after her version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” became a hit in America.When O’Connor arrived at Prince’s residence, she wrote, the singer criticized her for swearing in interviews. Prince then suggested the two engage in a pillow fight, she wrote, and began hitting her with a pillowcase containing a pillow and some hard object.O’Connor fled and Prince pursued her in his car, she wrote, until she escaped to a nearby home. (A spokeswoman for Prince’s estate did not respond to requests for comment.)“I never wanted to see that devil again,” O’Connor wrote. More

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      Taylor Swift-Quake: Fans Cause Seismic Activity at Seattle Concert

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      Seismometers can pick up many types of ground vibrations but this drew comparisons to the “Beast Quake” of 2011, when Seattle football fans roared in celebration of a last-minute Seahawks touchdown.“I shake it off, I shake it off,” Taylor Swift sang. And boy did her fans deliver.A Taylor Swift concert in downtown Seattle last weekend shook the ground so hard, it registered signals on a nearby seismometer roughly equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, seismologists said.“It’s certainly the biggest concert we’ve had in a while,” said Mouse Reusch, a seismologist at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors earthquake activity in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re talking about 70,000 people and all the music and paraphernalia associated with the concert.”The so-called “Swift Quake” recorded a maximum ground acceleration of roughly 0.011 meters per second squared, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University.Seismologists use acceleration to measure ground vibrations, which are then converted to the more conventional Richter scale, the common measurement for earthquakes.Seismometers can pick up ground vibrations of all types — including from cars and stampeding cattle — but the magnitude of the “Swift Quake” has drawn comparisons to the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011. That seismic activity was triggered when Seattle Seahawks fans roared in celebration following a last-minute touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, the running back whose nickname is “Beast Mode.”Reusch of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network said that the activity at the time was close to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake. The “Swift Quake” was recorded by the same seismic station, located just outside Lumen Field.The readings occurred throughout both of Taylor Swift’s concerts on the nights of July 22 and 23 and was sustained throughout. The shaking of the ground was more than “twice as hard” as at the 2011 Seahawks game, Caplan-Auerbach said. While this was 0.3 magnitude greater than in 2011, that’s a twofold difference under the Richter scale, which is logarithmic.A comparison of ground vibrations recorded by a seismometer near Lumen Field in Seattle for the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011 and the Swift Quake, which shook the earth twice as hard.Jackie Caplan-AuerbachThe likely cause was a combination of the music from the concert’s sound system and Taylor Swift’s fans — sometimes known as Swifties — dancing in sync with it, seismologists said.The pop megastar is currently four months into her Eras Tour, a sold-out 52-date national tour that has drawn immense crowds of Swifties to hear her perform songs spanning her 10-album career.Her opening Arizona show in March drew about 70,000 fans. Ticket prices for her show in Santa Clara on Friday were selling for up to $20,000 on Vivid Seats, a secondhand ticket exchange.The two back-to-back concerts in Seattle logged a near-identical pattern on the seismometer, Reusch said, which suggested the sets were nearly identical as well.“That was surprising to me, that we’re able to see something so coherent,” she said. “One was offset by about 26 minutes because it was late.”The shaking at both shows reached a maximum peak twice, first around 7:30 p.m., and the second around 9:30 p.m., according to data shared with The Times.It was not immediately clear which Taylor Swift songs caused the peaks. Besides “Shake It Off,” the set list included “Love Story,” “Bad Blood,” and “Anti-Hero,” all songs guaranteed to get Swifties on their feet.While the concerts shook the ground exceptionally hard, Caplan-Auerback said, it is important to understand that seismometers pick up signals from “anything that shakes the ground,” including cars, trains and even wind.Nor are Taylor Swift’s earthshaking abilities unique to the music world.The seismometer also recorded signals when The Weeknd played at Lumen Field on Aug. 25, 2022, Caplan-Auerback said, though they were not as strong.Beyoncé will be playing there on Sept. 14, she said. “I’ll be looking at that for sure.”As for Reusch, she was encouraged by the public attention.“Maybe there’s some young Swifties out there that will some day become seismologists or earth scientists,” she said. “That would be a real happy ending.” More

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      Randy Meisner, Founding Member of the Eagles, Dies at 77

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      The group’s original bass player, he was with the band from 1971 to 1977 but was uncomfortable with fame.Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal range on songs like “Take It to the Limit” helped catapult the rock band to international fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the band said on its website.“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the group said.Mr. Meisner, the band’s original bass player, helped form the Eagles in 1971 along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. He was with the band when they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On the Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, became among the band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for record of the year in 1978.But Mr. Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”He left the band in September 1977 but was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, published by the Hall of Fame for the event, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later became “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of excess and seduction that had begun spinning seriously out of control.”The Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s and had four consecutive No. 1 albums and five No. 1 singles, according to the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone sold upward of 26 million copies.Before joining the Eagles, Mr. Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, another Los Angeles country-rock band, formed in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.A list of survivors was not immediately available. His wife, Lana Meisner, was killed in an accidental shooting in 2016.Randall Herman Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Neb., on March 8, 1946, and started practicing music at a young age.He got his first acoustic guitar when he was around 12 or 13 and, shortly after, formed a high school band, according to a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar magazine. “We did pretty good, but we didn’t win anything,” he said.He was still a teenager when he joined another band and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965, he told Rock Cellar.“We couldn’t find any work because there were a million bands out here,” he said.Years later, Mr. Meisner would find plenty of work with the Eagles.“From Day One,” he told Rock Cellar, “I just had a feeling that the band was good and would make it.”A full obituary will appear shortly. More

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      Sinead O’Connor Was Ireland’s Alternative Moral Compass

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      In any society, she would have been radical for a pop star. But in Ireland, she was revolutionary.On March 9, Sinead O’Connor stood onstage at the Vicar Street concert venue in Dublin. Her presence was greeted by a prolonged standing ovation. O’Connor was at the RTE Choice Music Prize, an evening celebrating the best Irish albums of the past year. A new award had been invented for the occasion: classic Irish album, and O’Connor was there to accept it for her 1990 record, “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.”It was the day after my 40th birthday. Untethered by this life landmark, I felt strangely grounded by her presence: Sinéad is here, all is well in the world. Soaking in the noise of the audience cheering her on, she smiled, almost bashful, before dedicating the award to refugees in Ireland.O’Connor had a tendency to show up at necessary moments. This time, her reappearance was a relief, because everyone in the crowd was worried about her. Her son, Shane, took his own life in 2022. He was 17. She was no stranger to articulating her personal struggles: the abuse she suffered as a child, the impact of a news media that sometimes hounded her, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and PTSD.And now, here she was, onstage in Dublin, a strange sort of lighthouse, beaming again. “How is she?” I asked one of the stage crew. “Flying form,” came the answer.O’Connor receiving the Classic Irish Album award at the RTE Choice Music Prize, in Dublin, in March.Kieran Frost/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAt the time, there was something of an O’Connor renaissance occurring. Her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” was critically lauded, and she posted the positive reviews excitedly on social media. The 2022 documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, correctly positioned her as an alternative moral compass in Ireland, driven by integrity and authenticity, not shame.When I was a child, Ireland felt like a phony place, yet I had no way to conceptualize its inauthenticity. I was raised Catholic, and made to navigate the weirdness of First Holy Communion, novenas and trips to the shrine at Knock. The idea of defying this was incomprehensible. The dominance of the church was simply a given.I was 9 when television news bulletins framed O’Connor destroying a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” as blasphemous, missing the serious statement behind the act. As far as Irish society was concerned, he was a living saint. The incident rattled the country, and it also rattled me. You could do that?There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.O’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990.DMI/The Life Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAnd Ireland was in her songs. “Dublin in a rainstorm” was the setting for one of her finest, “Troy.” Her voice was pure and strong, and Anita Baker described it as “cavernous.” She traversed alt-rock and pop, reggae and traditional Irish music. She covered Prince, Nirvana and John Grant. On “8 Good Reasons” (a title that referred to the eyes of her four children, she explained), she sang, “You know I love to make music, but my head got wrecked by the business.”When I first interviewed O’Connor, in 2007, backstage at the Oxegen music festival, in Kildare, she seemed a little shaky, but utterly cool, friendly and fun. In 2014, I sat listening to her talk about her latest album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” as she chain-smoked in a Dublin recording studio, her face tattoos faded by laser removal treatment.Although I only knew her from afar, the sense of connection she created, both through the music and what she stood for, was profound. Her loss has instigated a deep collective grief across Ireland. She was a symbol of hope as much as defiance, an artist and thinker who always stood on the horizon, urging others to catch up.When I heard the news, I felt the gut-punch of loss. It was as though something elemental had departed the world, and some essential tributary had run dry within me.My wife stood up from the couch, walked to the fireplace, and lit a candle, the traditional gesture of Irish grief and remembrance. The national broadcaster’s main radio station played song after song. We remembered that night in March, when the roar and applause of the audience in Dublin seemed to say: thank you, we love you, you were right. More

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      Sinead O’Connor’s Death Is Not Suspicious, Police Say

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      The London police force said that the Irish singer was found dead at a home in the city.Sinead O’Connor was found dead in a private home in London, the city’s police said on Thursday, a day after the provocative Irish singer’s death was announced. While few details have been released about the death, the police said that it was not being treated as suspicious.Ms. O’Connor, best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was 56.Her family confirmed Ms. O’Connor’s death in a short statement. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinead,” the statement said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”Ms. O’Connor recently moved to London, according to local news media outlets. On Thursday afternoon, the city’s police force said in a statement that officers pronounced Ms. O’Connor dead at the scene at a residential address in southeast London. “A file will be prepared for the coroner,” the statement added.The local coroner’s court said in a news release that an autopsy would be undertaken, the results of which “may not available for several weeks.” Then a coroner would decide whether to hold an inquest into the cause of death, the news release added.Ms. O’Connor released 10 studio albums, including her 1990 breakthrough, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” Although her music cut through on both sides of the Atlantic, she was also known for stirring public controversy. In 1992, she ended an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” by ripping a photo of Paul John Paul II into pieces to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. More

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      10 Essential Songs by Sinead O’Connor

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      Her catalog is full of raw passion and raw nerve.Sinead O’Connor did not hold back. Not her voice, not her ideas, not her troubles, not her rage, not her sorrows, not her faith. From the moment her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” appeared in 1987, O’Connor — whose death was announced on Wednesday — flaunted raw passion and raw nerve.She seemed equally startling, at first, for her keening voice and her shaven head. Her singing encompassed cathartic extremes: lullabies and imprecations, sighs and howls. She made bold, intemperate public statements, like famously tearing up a photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Yet her songs also offered comfort, nurturing and righteousness; she was an idealist, not a provocateur. And she struggled openly: with the music business, with unforgiving journalists, with career pressures and with mental illness.O’Connor was emphatically Irish. The inflections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice, and she was shaped by her Catholic upbringing, if only to later reject it. Yet she was anything but provincial. She produced her own debut album when she was only 20, drawing already on punk, dance music, electronics and seething orchestral arrangements. She would go on to work with reggae, big-band music and more; her voice, even at its gentlest, could leap out.O’Connor’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as O’Connor sang about love, death, power and making her own place in the world. She went through some fallow patches afterward, but she never stopped striving to sing her own truth.‘Mandinka’ (1987)With a distorted, three-chord rock stomp, O’Connor brashly announces, “I don’t know no shame/I feel no pain,” landing hard on dissonant notes. The song seesaws between refusal and acceptance, with a final tease of “Soon I can give you my heart.” But O’Connor also flexes her high notes in nonsense syllables that are as defiant as any word she sings.‘Troy’ (1987)One side of a lover’s quarrel unfurls across an operatic six and a half minutes, backed by a string ensemble that underlines every churning emotion: memories, accusations, confessions, vows, pleas, warnings and the sheer desperation when O’Connor sings, “Does she hold you like I do?” followed by a howl of pain.‘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, O’Connor summons unabashed rasps and moans.‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990)O’Connor’s commercial peak — a No. 1 pop single — thoroughly commandeered a song Prince wrote for a 1985 album by 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.” Its video clip — almost entirely a close-up of O’Connor’s face against a black background — forged an indelible image of loneliness.‘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. Its narrator mourns the death of his lover, wishing to join her. O’Connor’s voice, completely exposed over the stark rhythm track, 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, O’Connor sings over two calmly strummed acoustic guitar chords, but agitation rises in her voice, and when a band eventually kicks in behind her there’s no mistaking her fury.‘You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart’ (1994)This incantatory rocker was written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer for the film “In the Name of the Father.” If it sounds like O’Connor fronting 1990s U2 — with a pealing piano and an implacable beat — it draws the best from both, with U2’s echoey depths, O’Connor’s primal peaks and the high-stakes dynamics they both thrived on.‘This Is to Mother You’ (1997)O’Connor promises to “do what your own mother didn’t do” in a song that radiates kindliness and womanly strength. It’s a folky, Celtic-tinged lullaby that promises to end a dark back story, to release someone — perhaps a lover, as the video suggests — from “All the pain that you have known/All the violence in your soul.” It’s pure unselfish comfort.‘Jealous’ (2000)“I don’t deserve to be lonely just ’cause you say I do,” O’Connor insists in “Jealous,” a not-quite-breakup ballad she wrote with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. The beat is measured. But the singer’s partner is keeping her dangling, and she’s not sure what she wants either; she makes her harshest judgments in her most fragile voice.‘Dense Water Deeper Down’ (2014)The folk-rock jubilation of “Dense Water Deeper Down” — with muscular guitar strumming, layered harmonies, even some happy horns — celebrates a lover who “makes me forget everything my mother warned.” There’s just one catch: He’s only a memory. More

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      The Night Sinead O’Connor Took on the Pope on ‘SNL’

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      Tearing up a photo was the moment nobody forgot. The performance that preceded it was just as powerful.What people remember about Sinead O’Connor’s Oct. 3, 1992, appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is this: At the end of her second performance of the show, a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor intoned gravely, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.” As she held tight to the word, stretching it like a castigation, she grabbed a photo of Pope John Paul II and held it up to camera. When she let the word go, she punctuated her exhale by tearing the photo three times, followed by an exhortation to “fight the real enemy.” She tossed the fragments to the ground, removed her in-ears, and stepped off the stage into culture-war infamy.Throughout her career, O’Connor — whose death, at 56, was announced on Wednesday — was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness. She was also a singer of ferocious gifts, able to channel anxious passion with vivacious power and move through a lyric with nimble acuity. She was something grander than a simple pop star — she became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s, a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.And so, in an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.But none of that extinguished the power of her protest. And she was a savvy radical — reportedly she had done something slightly different in rehearsal, and saved the pope photo for the actual show. (The photo itself had hung on the bedroom wall of O’Connor’s mother, who O’Connor later said had physically and sexually abused her as a child.) Also, she was on live television, holding court for three minutes on the miseries of discrimination and abuses of power, under the guise of being a pop star performing a song. She was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did.The recriminations O’Connor faced recall the bankrupt culture wars of a different era — she was “banned” from appearing on “Saturday Night Live” again, and the show mocked her on subsequent episodes. The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience. He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of “Saturday Night Live”; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)Joe Pesci on “Saturday Night Live” the week after Sinead O’Connor’s performance, holding up the taped-together photo of Pope John Paul II that O’Connor had ripped.NBCOf course, she was correct — the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Roman Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough — her piercing cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to “S.N.L.,” she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight. Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful — the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her “War” cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” that night.)She’s performing “War” a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left.Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole. Marley’s original — the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 — moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:Until the ignoble and unhappy regimeWhich holds all of us throughChild abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,Subhuman bondage has been toppledUtterly destroyedEverywhere is warIf there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.” More