Sinéad O'Connor

O'Connor named Dylan a "growing up" influence in a 1991 Rolling Stone interview, and her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, pins the moment down: hearing "Idiot Wind" as a girl, she remembered thinking, "it's really angry... he isn't pretending to be nice all the time." But when she catalogued the debt in full, decades later, she was careful about its shape: "I've said in every interview I've ever done that he's been a huge influence on me, spiritually speaking." It's a claim about permission, not sound — that a singer could stay furious in a verse and never soften it.

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone (1991) — Sinéad O'Connor interview naming Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand as growing-up influences ↗share

1975

Idiot WindBob Dylan

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1990

Black Boys on MopedsSinéad O'Connor

listen forOn "Idiot Wind," Dylan lets a verse curdle into open contempt and just leaves it there, unresolved, over a full band that never softens the words. "Black Boys on Mopeds" does the same thing stripped to voice and acoustic guitar: O'Connor names a British prime minister and a dead teenager in one plain sentence and never steps back to cushion the accusation. Neither song resolves into forgiveness — that flat, undefended anger is the through-line, even though O'Connor herself frames the debt as spiritual rather than musical.

O'Connor called Van Morrison, flatly, "my favourite artist of all time." She didn't hear him until she was eighteen and newly arrived in London, when her label boss Nigel Grainge handed her some of his records. "I never heard him before," she wrote in her memoir Rememberings. "He sounds like one of those Tibetan monks, the kind who use their voices for healing." Decades later she paid the debt back directly, recording her own version of his "Who Was That Masked Man" for Hot Press's 2020 tribute marking his seventy-fifth birthday.

listen: upstream & heresource: Hot Press (2020) — O'Connor's own written testimony calling Van Morrison "my favourite artist of all time" ↗share

1974

Who Was That Masked ManVan Morrison

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2020

Who Was That Masked ManSinéad O'Connor

listen forO'Connor was specific about why she picked that song: she called "Who Was That Masked Man" itself "the most beautiful discussion of terrorism I've heard... very mellow, and his use of language is mindblowing." On Veedon Fleece, Morrison keeps the song's violence at a hush rather than raising his voice to match it — the mellowness is the point. That's the exact track, out of Morrison's whole catalogue, she chose to record for his birthday tribute: the one she'd already told the world was his most beautiful.

O'Connor called herself "a massive roots fan" and "a Rastafarian... for years," but her reggae influence had one specific name. "He's my favorite songwriter," she said of Burning Spear, the singer behind 1975's Marcus Garvey: "he doesn't do small talk... Spear can impart an entire world of information in the space of five sentences." Comparing Spear's subject, the Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, to the Irish revolutionary Patrick Pearse, she recorded four of his songs on 2005's Throw Down Your Arms — notably, none by the more famous Bob Marley, who she has said she barely listened to growing up.

listen: upstream & heresource: Nicholas Jennings (2005 interview, published 2023) — O'Connor on Burning Spear as "my favorite songwriter" and on Bob Marley not being an early influence ↗share

1975

Marcus GarveyBurning Spear

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2005

Marcus GarveySinéad O'Connor

listen forBurning Spear's original "Marcus Garvey" rides a slow, insistent reggae groove under a low, half-chanted vocal that never quite becomes a melody — closer to oratory than pop singing, which is what O'Connor meant calling him a songwriter who "doesn't do small talk." Her 2005 version, produced with Sly and Robbie, keeps that same unhurried chant rather than smoothing it into something more conventionally sung. Listen for how little either version hurries toward a hook — the point, in both, is the message sitting still long enough to land.