Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included CCR’s “Ramble Tamble,” Beethoven’s “Pathetique,” and The Electric Six’s “Improper Dancing.”

I think I’m here because of nostalgia. I have no other explanation for the feeling I woke up to a few days ago when I thought to myself, “You know what song I’d like to hear today? ‘No Man’s Woman’ by Sinead O’Connor.” I haven’t heard the song in years and years, and probably would have never heard it in the first place if a friend of my wife hadn’t given her — not me — a copy of “Faith and Courage.”

She is more famous for doing crazy things than she is for her songs. I would imagine people 20 years from now will be surprised to learn she was a singer primarily and not just some upstart. If you think about it, the only two songs anybody ever thinks of when they think of Sinead is “Nothing Compares To You” and “The Song She Sang On SNL That Nobody Actually Remembers Because She Tore Up A Picture Of The Pope.” That was Bob Marley’s “War.”

I feel like I know way more about O’Connor’s personal life than her musical career, and that might be to her benefit. It’s like “Plastic Ono Band,” an album that only works emotionally if you know who John Lennon is and what band he was in, but who doesn’t know that? Even if you can’t list off the specifics of O’Connor’s life, you can ballpark the whole thing into one lumpy “she’s often emotional and upset” bag. Off the top of my head and with no research, I want to say that she fought to become a Catholic priest and was a lesbian for a stint, but I might be way off. What I do know is that she had a bald head for a while, and that was the first straw in herf controversy barn. Whether my facts are straight or not, the real truth is that I hang onto them, and they make her career more vivid in my imagination.

This is what I’ve longed to cling to all week. To be perfectly honest, the GSATM’s recently have fallen off my obsession radar, and that might have more to do with my own personal distractions than the quality of the music (”Smash You” deserves the title, for example, just as the Houston Rockets deserve to be NBA champs during those two years Michael Jordan wasn’t playing; just because the NBA wasn’t as interesting or as competetive doesn’t mean the winning team shouldn’t win–though I have probably argued for an asterisk). I’m hustling for work, turning down horrible looking jobs (yes, they still make jobs where you drive for an hour plus to sit in a windowless room smelling like old paper only to TEST for the job to see if you QUALIFY for an interview. An interview that won’t happen until the next day, by which time you will have realized you won’t take it even if they upped the offer to–get ready for it–$13 an hour), and preparing for our family’s first baby. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and the brain space that would normally be dedicated to repeat play dissection and obsession has to figure out where to get a will made and how to build a dresser with a changing table. So I need something more than just music. I need power.

Which brings us to “No Man’s Woman,” a the sonic equivalent of victory and the 1990’s. It’s the song I need at this moment, even if the context of the lyrics don’t relate to me/call into question my sexuality. “No Man’s” was clearly made in the post Alanis period of angry-musical-women production, but it happens to come with the context that has plagued and actually helps O’Connor’s career. Like I said earlier without any research, O’Connor has tried to become a priest. She’s a very spiritual person, and the song appears to be about her relationship with God. By the end.

Before the end, we get a trip down production memory lane, where sort-of dance beats walk us into the declaration that Sinead doesn’t wanna be no man’s woman. She’s giving up on guys. I don’t blame her. The lyrics border on hacky but stay just short of that perjorative by ringing true. What made “Nothing Compares To You” such a hit was that tear she cried during the video. It’s a sad song (or, at least, a sad sounding song), and that tear was validation. O’Connor’s career has been largely in support of that tear–seeing her protest the Catholic church, and speak out about any atrocity she wants to has all proven what we believed from that video: this girl takes it seriously. She can sing the hell out of these songs because she believes them.

This might technically qualify her as crazy if she weren’t a celebrity. Since we know who she is, this makes her a serious artist, one with little tolerance for compromise. As Viv Savage says, without a stage to perform on Sinead might get a bit stupid and go crazy. As it is, she’s a one-hit wonder everyone knows with a fantastic singing voice.

More on the relationship with God: maybe this is how the song transcends being weird that a straight guy like me would enjoy it so much. The song really about a person who’s sick of being betrayed and depressed (I get that) and finding the one thing that makes her feel great (I’d love that). It’s not that she doesn’t want a mate; it’s that she only wants to be her own person, which is pretty much the whole of O’Connor’s career.

I’m an emotional listener when it comes to songs like this: if the music and singing sounds like triumph, then I feel triumphant, forgiving all betraying lyrics there might be. This song starts kind of down and bitter. Just by having “No” in there, I get the negativity and I don’t think I’m wrong. By the end, O’Connor has used this title to describe what she wants to be by way of defining what she never wants to be. I really get this. I struggle with what I want to accomplish, but I know exactly what I don’t want to do. This is because I’m a negative, suspicious person. I must have hope that there’s hope for people like me, and the musicality of “No Man’s” provides it. Around the 1:45 mark, we get the first truly joyous synergy of Sinead’s voice and the instruments, when she describes the one who “Never does me harm/Never treats me bad” (implying there have been others who HAVE treated her bad and done her harm). We get one more half-chorus until we return to the final beautiful chorus-mantra. The production kicks in strings and drums and becomes everything “Rent” wanted to be without the Broadway shmaltz. O’Connor could have described the song’s that way: “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not ‘Rent.’”

—Phillip Mottaz

Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included The Ramones’ “Indian Giver,” R.E.M.’s “Me In Honey,” and Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls.”

I have to stop being dumb about lyrics. Or I need to stop paying attention to old songs I thought I knew well, only to discover I don’t understand a thing. I wish I could say that I came to obsess over “7″ by way of a spiritual awakening, but that’s not the case. My wife and I were walking a dog named Seven, and a small debate was held over whether she was named after the song or George Costanza’s potential son. The answer was never learned, and another mystery was borne unto the world. But I spent the whole hike humming what I remembered of the song, and upon returning home I played it again for the first time in years.

I like Prince. I think he’s incredibly talented. And by this point in the paragraph, you must realize I’m qualifying a lot to cushion an upcoming blow, so here it is: Prince is a weird dude. Weirdness generated out of contradiction. He’s a strange walking dichotomy of overtly over-sex and Jehova’s witness, if rumors are to be believed in the latter case. He signed a roughly 500 billion dollar recording deal only to immediately complain about it, thereby changing his name to a symbol, which is the official title of the album in containing the song in question. And on that album, Prince kicks things off with “My Name is Prince” — ironic since soon after, his name would actually not be Prince — and then “Sexy M.F.” containing the lamest lyrics in the world because they’re so one-dimentionally “sexy” only to eventually land on the religious intonations of “7″. I didn’t even get into the whole completely straight gay guy wearing ass-less pants and quirky up-do’s who slept with Kim Bassinger and wrote songs for Sinead O’Connor, or that he was the only pre-texting adult to actively use “U” when writing “you.”

I don’t think I’m ever as conscious of the writer’s relationship with God as I am when Prince deals with it, mostly because it seems foreign to me in a rock ‘n’ roll connotation. I tend to believe that fiction writers and book writers must believe in God by the very nature of their profession. They themselves create worlds and inhabitants and lay out “a plan” for every move in that world, so it seems like a natural fit that they would envision themselves as the characters in someone else’s story. This ties more to the ego of the writer than anything else (”I am God of my world, so there must be a God of his own world in order to validate my world”). Obviously music has been closely related to religion, but often times my favorite “religious” rock songs are ones which create spiritual feelings, not the songs which, say, predict the end of the world in great detail.

As I’ve lamented both here and in other cases, Prince’s strong suit is not his lyrics. He’s lucky that his musical strengths are so far beyond most mortal humans that his lyrical sins gain absolution. So maybe I’m not dumb about lyrics; I just get more easily suckered in to the great musical elements that I don’t pay as much attention to the words. I’ve always had a good grip on the chorus, which out of context with the rest of the song just seems like more non-sequitur rock BS, throwing in “savoir-faire” for rhyming purposes alone. But in the context of the verses, it doesn’t explain too much, except that he mentions other “7″ things. After inspecting the lyric sheets more closely, I’m happy to discover he doesn’t actually say “giant spider” but “surely die in spite of” as in “And every evil soul will surely die in spite of their 7 tears.”

More comforting, right? Immediately before that line he speaks of the plague and a river of blood with the kind of casual speech even Dethklok would notice.

I suppose it could be commended that someone as popular and prolific as Prince can so boldly stand up for his beliefs and preach to legions of his fans in the context of a pop song, but doesn’t his message get a little muddy with the spooky cackle under the first instrumental stanza? And at the same time, I would argue that a song like “Raspberry Beret” is more “Heavenly” simply because it does not invite any direct comparisons to Heaven. Maybe I’m holding too much against the artist for infusing an otherwise catchy, innovative and fantastic pop song with ideas beyond boy wants girl, but that’s what I can relate to. The best sermons are those that make the unfathomable relate to our daily lives. In some regard, Prince has done that with “7″, because I’m now considering these ideas. When they’re taken out of the context of the music — as I did by cold quoting them earlier — they seem weird and kind of crazy. When they’re combined with great music, they become something else.

Inevitable Video Note: I can’t find a video for this song. I can think of many reasons why…

1. Prince guards his music like a Swiss bank. Remember that video of him at Cochella doing “Creep?” It’s like he’s the Memory police–What video of him doing “Creep?” It was never there…”;
2. Prince has weird song titles, so looking for something called “7″ gets a lot of random crap;
3. Prince’s name is sort of weird, so looking for something with “Prince” in the title gets a lot of random crap;
4. Prince hates the internet and all its glory.

Some or all of these is true. Whatever the case, look it up yourself, then realize you can’t find it, then go to iTunes and support the guy’s mansion castle.