The reason why Sinéad O’Connor stopped singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’
On February 12th, 2020, at what turned out to be her final concert, Sinéad O’Connor sang her most iconic song for the final time. After a full set that incorporated material from across her career, O’Connor dutifully trotted out her cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compare 2 U’ as the penultimate song during her main set. Nobody in the audience at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, California knew it at the time, but it would be the last time that O’Connor would ever perform in public.
For most casual music fans, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was the quintessential Sinéad O’Connor song. The track was O’Connor’s only number one hit during her lifetime, rising to the top of the charts in 14 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and her native Ireland. Intrinsically linked with O’Connor’s artistic persona, the singer transformed Prince’s jilted response to an abandoned lover into a mournful eulogy for her mother.
Throughout most of her live shows, O’Connor included the track in her setlists. But by the middle of the 2010s, O’Connor had lost her connection to the song. Instead of simply trotting out her classic rendition of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, O’Connor opted to remove the song from her live repertoire, explaining her decision in a social media post.
“OK, the time has come for me to cease singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’,” O’Connor explained in a Facebook post in March of 2015. “The first principle of the manner in which I’m trained as a singer (bel canto) is we never sing a song we don’t emotionally identify with.”
“I don’t want audiences to be disappointed coming along to a show and then not hearing it, so I am letting you know here that you won’t,” O’Connor added. “If I were to sing it just to please people, I wouldn’t be doing my job right, because my job is to be emotionally available. I’d be lying. You’d be getting a lie. My job is to give you honesty. I’m trained in honesty. I can’t act. It just isn’t in my training. I have ceased singing other songs over the years for the same reason.”
O’Connor gave ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ a final farewell during her performance at the Művészetek Palotája in Budapest, Hungary on April 21st. When she returned to the stage after a three-year hiatus in 2018 with a four-song set at Robert Smith’s personally curated Meltdown festival in 2018, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was not on the setlist.
However, the song’s retirement proved to be short-lived. When O’Connor appeared on the Irish chat programme The Late Late Show in September of 2019, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was trotted out for the first time in nearly half a decade. At her next public performance just over a month later at the Roisin Dubh in Galway, Ireland, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was once again a central part of O’Connor’s setlist.
Check out ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ down below.
