Stereo Warning

Why did you avoid all those hit songs for a while?
I don’t think I avoided them, I haven’t really been on tour for 10 years is all. The only tour I did was in Ireland and England with a lot of traditional Irish songs and at the time they were more appropriate than my own songs.

Do you see those songs in a new light now?
I don’t approach them any differently, but I suppose some of the those songs I wrote when I was 15, and it’s a nice feeling to be 40 and doing stuff that you wrote that long ago. It makes even more sense to me now that when I wrote them in the first place.

They still speak to you?
I would never sing anything that doesn’t speak to me. I couldn’t do a good job singing something that didn’t.

Talk about your new album.
The theme on that album is based around or inspired by particular scriptures. For years it was something I wanted to do because some of those scriptures are really beautiful and really poetic. They’re really crying out for music, but a lot of religious music is corny. So I was really interested in trying to create something that was on the right side of the line between corny and cool. It’s supposed to just be a beautiful thing, it’s not any big message or anything.

Are you religious as a person?
I am someone who thinks that God and religion are two different things. I’m interested in religion and I study it a lot, all my life, but I’m more interested in God than religion, if you know what I mean. But I don’t believe in fucking going on about it. I lived in Atlanta and I grew up in catholic Ireland our priests are quite boring, quite bland, they flicking bits of dust off the altar in the middle of the mass like they’re bored. So I got a bit addicted watching the preachers when I lived in Atlanta cuz they were so alive and completely mental. I thought it would be great to bring them back to Ireland so they could teach the priests how to do it. There was one guy I loved best, his name was Creflo Dollar, he was always going on about how it’s okay to pray for money. I think it’s brilliant.

What do you think of religion in general in the US? Too religious maybe?
I'm not really familiar with it. The only experience I’ve ever had was on this record when I was doing promotion I talked to a lot of Christian media and 20 percent of them get really angry if you suggest that God doesn’t like war. If you even say that perhaps, maybe, God might not like war they get really angry. But that’s all over the world I supposed, with lots of different religions. They’re all wondering around insisting that God likes war, especially if it’s against people of a different religion. That’s why I separate God and religion, because God is getting a bad rap because of these fuckers.

Are you tired of being asked about that episode when you tore the Pope's picture?
No. it’s natural that people ask, so…

What did you want to accomplish with the new album?
Something that might begin to reclaim the good name of the God character. It pisses me off to see these people blowing people up and saying they’re doing it on behalf of God, and that libels God. If there is a God then that is the most libeled creature ever. I do believe there’s a God but I don’t know what it looks like or what you call it and all that kind of shit and I think it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter if you call it Allah, God or whatever. I don’t believe God is in any way violent or would support use of violence as a means of sorting things out. So I wanted to kind of argue these people on their own theology. Go into their very scriptures and show how the opposite of what their saying is true. I wanted to lift out scriptures that would show the peaceful nature of the God character.

How do you feel right now in your career and your life?
Comfortable.

Where are you going from here?
I don’t know, that’s the advantage that you don’t know what’s around the next corner.

Introduce yourself in a few words.
Christ, that’s very difficult. I’d be too nervous. I’d probably just say, I’m Sinead, and that would be it.

What's your biggest contradiction?
That I’m an intensely shy person but I do what I do for a living. I just close my eyes or look at the floor. If I look at the audience, really I’m fucked.

What's the best place in the world to be?
At home with my kids.

Have you ever had to compromise your art?
I’ve done it twice in my entire career and I hated it and I wouldn’t do it anymore. One was when I recorded a song for a band for their album. I fucking hated the song, it was horrible. Every time I had to sing in the studio I just wanted to barf, it was horrible. i won't say what it was, it wouldn't be fair. [We have a pretty good hunch she's talking about 'Tears from the Moon'... -- ed.] ]But I got paid a lot of money. The other one was recently actually, my management talked me into doing a corporate thing because they offered me 75,000 quid. It was a whisky company in Ireland launching a new whisky and it was fucking awful. It was devil business I will never do that again, but I got paid a lot.

What makes you happy/sad?
My kids make me happy. My boyfriend makes me happy. Stuff on TV makes me sad usually. The news. I’m mostly watching what goes on here and in England cuz I’ve lived in the states and in England a couple of times. I’m not so interested in irish news, it’s kinda boring. Nothing interesting ever happens.

How do you create your music?
Generally songs come to me when I’m doing stuff like washing the dishes or pushing the baby up the street. I start to get tunes inside myself when I’m doing ordinary household things. But I don’t really sit down to try to write something. If the tunes are there then I might vocalize them but I don’t sit down and try to create them. They just start singing their way to you, that’s how I see it. They have a kind of a life of their own, their own consciousness.

What was your greatest moment of doubt?
Probably in labor. With all four of my children.