St. Petersburg Times
November 20, 1992, Friday, City Edition

Our 'Girl' Sinead goes out on a sentimental limb

HELEN A.S. POPKIN


   Sinead O'Connor wants you to know something. What now, you ask?

   She wants you to know why she recorded Am I Not Your Girl?, a compilation  of
torch songs and swing tunes, some of which were popularized 30-plus years  ago.

   "These are the songs I grew up listening to. They are the songs that made  me
want to be a singer. That's the why," she writes in the liner notes.

   Dandy, you say. Just dandy, Sinead.

   At first, Am I Not Your Girl? seems like yet another outrageous request to
 be understood by the outspoken albeit confused young pop singer. Fans came to
 love her as the angry and lovelorn post-punk crooner with a high clear voice
 and a shaven pate. None of this has changed, really. O'Connor is still as
 angry and lovelorn as she is bald. But now she asks her mostly young fans to
 appreciate and relate to a style of music they did not grow up with or can
 relate to.

   Of course, this is one of the smaller requests of a woman who recently
 horrified the world by shredding a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live
 - an act many people consider more obscene than every picture in Madonna's
 photo essay, Sex. O'Connor is notorious for her outspoken views and actions,
 many of which she has later recanted. Who knows if she'll do the same with
 this anachronistic release.

   Am I Not Your Girl? is an unremarkable but refreshing piece of work.
 O'Connor has selected material suited to her vocal range. The big band
 orchestration is fabulous. But O'Connor lacks the personality and pizazz
 needed at make these songs work in 1992.

   Digging in with her Irish grit on Why Don't You Do Right, O'Connor adds an
 amusing bite to the only song here that really makes any attempt at letting
 go. But she falls harder than Mary Ann when she attempts I Want to Be Loved By
 You - with that boop boop bee do addendum only Gilligan's Ginger was meant to
 sing.

   A dramatically twisted arrangement for Success Has Made A Failure of Our
 Home makes this Tammy Wynette song more like something O'Connor might have
 penned herself in one of her violently depressed moods. In kind, Don't Cry for
 Me Argentina could be the story of O'Connor's life. "Have I said too
 much?/There's nothing more that I can think of to say to you," she sings as
 the orchestra crescendos.

   Wanna bet?

   If you were one of the many offended by O'Connor's attack on the pope, you
 will want to avoid the last addition, a litany against the Roman Catholic
 Church. In this speech, O'Connor assures us she is not full of hate, but love.
 She's just angry.

   Still, love her or hate her, you are compelled to ask, why are you telling
 me all this?