10 essential songs by Sinead O’connor

The Irish singer, who died last month at age 56, had a music catalog full of raw passion and raw nerve

Sinead O’connor did not hold back. Not her voice, not her ideas, not her troubles, not her rage, not her sorrows, not her faith. From the moment her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” appeared in 1987, O’connor — whose death was announced July 26 — f launted raw passion and raw nerve.

She seemed equally startling, at first, for her keening voice and her shaven head. Her singing encompassed cathartic extremes: lullabies and imprecations, sighs and howls. She made bold, intemperate public statements, like famously tearing up a photograph of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Yet her songs also offered comfort, nurturing and righteousness; she was an idealist, not a provocateur. And she struggled openly: with the music business, with unforgiving journalists, with career pressures and with mental illness.

O’connor was emphatically Irish. The inf lections of old Celtic music sharpened her voice, and she was shaped by her Catholic upbringing, if only to later reject it. Yet she was anything but provincial. She produced her own debut album when she was only 20, drawing already on punk, dance music, electronics and seething orchestral arrangements. She would go on to work with reggae, bigband music and more; her voice, even at its gentlest, could leap out.

O’connor’s first two albums were her most inspired ones. They were charged with youthful turbulence and unbridled ambition, as O’connor sang about love, death, power and making her own place in the world. She went through some fallow patches afterward, but she never stopped striving to sing her own truth.

CASPER DALHOFF AP