‘Troy’: Sinéad O’Connor’s scathing review of Dublin
The singer-activist Sinéad O’Connor bravely bared her traumas of infancy to make her magnum opus, a poignant depiction of a besieged city and its “phoenix from the flame”, with ‘Troy’, the first song on her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, riddled with visceral imagery and challenging themes, taking listeners through a darker Dublin.
The songwriter grew up in the Irish capital with an abusive mother, whose love she plaintively questions in her song: “I know you’re always telling me that you love me,/ But just sometimes I wonder if I should believe”, the singer spells out.
Her more abstract craft is rather deployed for the core structure of the song, since its name ‘Troy’ invokes a city that let its guard down to let a destructive horse filled with Greek soldiers in to let itself be captured. The literary acuteness present in O’Connor’s lyrical craft presents a city taken by storm, and the vivid spectacle of her words worsens the wound of a challenging track.
The haunting spectacle opens with an account of being locked outside of her childhood home for what she later confirmed to be weeks at a time. What could first be thought of as a romantic invocation, her memory of “Dublin in a rainstorm” is followed by the image of a dejected child, “sitting in the long grass in summer,/ Keeping warm”.
The lights would eventually be turned off inside the home, leaving her in total darkness, alone against the city’s shadows. Her periods of isolation are forcefully faced by the listener in the doleful lamentation, “You should have left the light on”.
The memories unfold very literally, as the intimate narration challenges O’Connor’s siblings, “Oh, does she love you?”, for having faced a lesser fate, and her speculation about her mother’s unravelling maternal instincts, with the lines “Tell me, when did the light die?”, is yet more psychologically revealing to the listener who is aware that the songwriter’s mother passed away in a car accident when her daughter was 17.
O’Connor only recorded the song three years later, at 20, while pregnant with her first child, giving birth to Jake just a few weeks before the song was released, in 1987, marking a touchstone moment, having become a parent herself.
The rest of The Lion and the Cobra lacks the orchestral element that makes this song so urgent and alive, like the traumas that seep from its loaded lyrics, and it also features different themes throughout its six minutes. Going from orchestral instrumentation to a quiet bridge, and finally into a seemingly more ‘normal’ ’80s popular song, the structure of the track could be interpreted to mirror the process of learning to overcome a loaded childhood, coming in with an initial confrontation, followed by taking space, and ending in a final blooming acceptance of the hand dealt.
O’Connor later revealed that the two chords on this song are so singularly used because they were the only ones she knew how to play on guitar at the time, yet the simplicity highlights the intensity of its lyrics and the mythological take on a city in flames, which would have been the childhood she endured in Dublin, wherein the touching vicinity the listener is invited into makes this cut a unique piece of songwriting craft, one for which the ever-surprising O’Connor is warmly remembered.
