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Sinead O'Connor's Final Album Was One Track Away From Completion
Last edited Sat Jul 29, 2023, 09:58 AM - Edit history (1)
Rolling Stone link: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/sinead-oconnor-dead-inside-making-last-album-1234796872/
THE CALLS TO producer David Holmes’ Belfast home studio arrived sporadically, sometimes a week or a mere few days in advance. “Are you around?” Sinéad O’Connor would say. “Do you have time?” If Holmes did, O’Connor would then take the nearly three-hour drive from her home in Bray, the Irish coastal town where she was then living, to continue work on what would be the last album of her life.
On July 11, just two weeks before she was found unresponsive in her new home in London, O’Connor announced that she would “soon be finishing my album.” The record, No Veteran Dies Alone, had been in the works for about five years and would have been O’Connor’s first since 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss. According to Holmes, the eight-song album — which he describes as “emotional and really personal” — was one track away from completion when O’Connor died.
Holmes, the renowned Irish DJ and producer who has scored films (the Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels among them) and made pioneering EDM albums like Let’s Get Killed, first met O’Connor briefly at an awards show in the late Nineties. But they finally had a chance to speak at a 60th birthday party for the Pogues’ Shane McGowan around 2017. “She was walking to where I was standing, and I introduced myself,” Holmes says. “She didn’t know anything about me, really. But I said I wanted to make a record about healing since I’ve had my own issues with mental health, and music was always a comfort. And as a producer, I always felt that Sinéad hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was possible with her voice.”
The two first worked together on a cover of gospel great Mahalia Jackson’s “Trouble of the World,” which O’Connor released in 2020 in response to George Floyd’s death. Holmes had an immediate taste of O’Connor’s intense devotion to her craft when he heard a knock on the door of his home in Belfast at 9 a.m. O’Connor told him that she was so psyched about the track that she had left her home in the middle of the night to work on it with him: “She said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, and it was 3 a.m. and I drove up.’ She must have been sitting in my driveway for a couple of hours.”
On July 11, just two weeks before she was found unresponsive in her new home in London, O’Connor announced that she would “soon be finishing my album.” The record, No Veteran Dies Alone, had been in the works for about five years and would have been O’Connor’s first since 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss. According to Holmes, the eight-song album — which he describes as “emotional and really personal” — was one track away from completion when O’Connor died.
Holmes, the renowned Irish DJ and producer who has scored films (the Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels among them) and made pioneering EDM albums like Let’s Get Killed, first met O’Connor briefly at an awards show in the late Nineties. But they finally had a chance to speak at a 60th birthday party for the Pogues’ Shane McGowan around 2017. “She was walking to where I was standing, and I introduced myself,” Holmes says. “She didn’t know anything about me, really. But I said I wanted to make a record about healing since I’ve had my own issues with mental health, and music was always a comfort. And as a producer, I always felt that Sinéad hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was possible with her voice.”
The two first worked together on a cover of gospel great Mahalia Jackson’s “Trouble of the World,” which O’Connor released in 2020 in response to George Floyd’s death. Holmes had an immediate taste of O’Connor’s intense devotion to her craft when he heard a knock on the door of his home in Belfast at 9 a.m. O’Connor told him that she was so psyched about the track that she had left her home in the middle of the night to work on it with him: “She said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, and it was 3 a.m. and I drove up.’ She must have been sitting in my driveway for a couple of hours.”
- more at link -
I hope her album gets released anyway. Perhaps add a few of her most requested songs as bonus tracks.
