Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir, Rememberings, is out today, and the singer has been making the morning chat show rounds, discussing everything from her infamous 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live to her conversion to Islam.
On The Today Show, Carson Daly focused mainly on the impact that SNL appearance had on her career. In 1992, O’Connor was riding high on the success of her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Then she famously ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live TV to protest sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The incident supposedly derailed her career, but O’Connor insists it actually got her back on track.
“Sinead O’Connor was never meant to be a pop star,” she tells Daly. “I was really a protest singer.”
O’Connor also reveals that the photo she shredded was actually taken off of her abusive mother’s bedroom wall. “It was a way of ripping her up as well, I guess,” she says.
Meanwhile, on the UK’s Good Morning Britain, O’Connor talked religion with hosts Adil Ray and Ranvir Singh. The singer converted to Islam in 2018 and now says she feels as though she’s always been a Muslim: “It does say in the Koran for those that are real Muslims, you know, that you will feel when you read it like you always were a Muslim.”
O’Connor says that while she’s studied different religious theologies her entire life, she came to Islam late, due in part to her own prejudices. “I had bought into the nonsense that people talk about Islam,” she explains. “But as a theologist then, when I got to look at just Chapter 2 of the Koran…the intelligence of the scripture, the intelligence of the way Allah uses language—to me, that showed that it could only have been supernaturally written. There is no human being on earth could have put together the language and composition of the Koran.”
She also talked about the ways that music and religion have always been intertwined for her, from the profound feelings she would experience singing Christmas carols as a child to hearing the Muslim call to prayer, which she calls the most hopeful song she’s ever heard. “I used to listen to it for years every night before shows before I even studied Islam,” she says. “I didn’t even know what the people were saying when they were reciting it, and it still was very moving.”
In addition to Rememberings, O’Connor plans to release a new album, her first since 2014, in the fall and embark on a concert tour.
