Sinead O'Connor Got Riddim

Some 15 years removed from the height of her commercial success and infamy, Sinead O’Connor now bears little resemblance to the girl known for her emotional outbursts on our television screens circa 1990. And it has nothing to do with her slowly graying hair, or the new lines on her face. At 39, she’s making music wholly for herself at her own pace. And her new roots-reggae album, Throw Down Your Arms, could just be the most personally satisfying and important she’s ever made.

Still in disbelief that it’s actually gone from dream to reality, the album, to O’Connor (pictured above, center), is not merely a reggae record; it’s a Rasta record; it’s a religious record. Featuring the famed Sly and Robbie rhythm section, the disc takes it name from one of five songs written and originally recorded by roots master Burning Spear, one of O’Connor’s idols, and also features her take on songs by Bob Marley, Buju Banton, Peter Tosh and others.

Paste: Tell me about the first time you heard reggae music.
O’Connor: I was quite small. I think it was around 1969. Toots and the Maytals had a huge hit record, 54-46.

What in the music did you find attractive?
There was something in the attitude of it, where he’s very bold and very naughty. And take into account that I’m living in a country where the religion is teaching me that to be a good person, I have to think that I’m shit. So I hear even in the tone of Toots and the Maytals, actually, that the opposite is true, which is the same that I see in the civil-rights movement, and the same that I see from Muhammad Ali.

The music would go on to have a deep, lasting impact on you.
Yeah. It informed why I wanted to be a singer. What made me want to be a singer was to communicate with God, and to rescue God from religion and this is what I saw these guys doing. This is how I perceived what they were doing. And they may not have perceived it that way, but I did. To me, when I heard these guys singing—regardless of the music in the background—the way these guys sang from their hearts with feeling, as opposed to the kind of 4/4, you know, the type of religious songs that are designed to squash all feeling [laughs]…

It felt like freedom to you?
Yeah. Freedom of the soul, exactly.

But it wasn’t until your time in London in the ’80s that you really explored Rastafarianism and roots reggae.
Right. My manager would play records all night, and among them would be maybe two or three roots records, and there were a lot of tunes where you’d hear scriptures in them, people quoting bits out of the Bible.

And that’s what caught your ear the most?
Yeah, even on Portobello Road, they’d be blaring [it] out of these big speakers, and suddenly you would hear parts of Psalm 1. And as I started spending more time around Rastas, it was interesting to me how these guys spoke about God, and how they perceived God, and how they talked about God, and how it was such an important thing to them that they would argue about it in the f---ing street. But their handle on the Irish Catholic was fascinating to me because it was completely the opposite of what I had been taught.