A short trip back to teenagehood with Sinéad O’Connor and some latest diary entries
Be prepared for 00’s nostalgia
Listening to: Sinéad, of course 🤍 Daddy I’m Fine
Greetings Earthlings,
How are you getting on this 3rd day of August? I know it’s quite obvious to open with a Sinéad O’Connor song, and I am not going to pretend I was her no.1 fan as I wasn’t so clued up on all her music but one album I knew intimately and in a great amount of learning-the-lyrics-off-by-heart detail, a detail that only a girl in the full throes of teenagedom can achieve, is Faith and Courage. I obviously robbed it from my Mum’s collection as I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to desire a Sinéad O’Connor album when I was mostly just saturated in high masc band Blink 182 and an obsession with Kurt Cobain. Somehow Sinéad found her way to my CD player and once she was there she underwent the rigorous rituals that inscribed her lyrics forever on my brain, such as pausing the song every sentence so I could figure out and write down the words. Or perhaps they were written in the CD booklet and I studied them in detail, rewriting them with the precision of a scribe entrusted with the Book of Kells.
Although every song on the album is significant, and each quite musically distinct from the last, the song which most spoke to me at the time was Daddy I’m Fine. This song incorporated everything I was aspiring to at the time through the rock gods I was pouring over, and yet, Sinéad showed me the power could be in my hands. I was the girl wanting to break out of the “town with not too much going down” and suddenly I saw myself with the guitar, with the slicked back hair and the black leather boots. Instead of rock-goddette-by-association I could aspire to be Rock Goddess. With the hormones raging, the song spoke to me of desire and how as a girl, as a woman, you could be in power of your own desire. This album fascinated me, and I only wish I had paid her more heed in those years. Instead of feminist icons, I worshipped men-who-did-drugs. Although Faith and Courage made a huge impression on me, I didn’t have the faith or courage at the time to put all my eggs into worshipping myself before anyone else. Twenty years later, I am relating more to the second Sinéad in Daddy I’m Fine, the one who “stands up tall with my pride upright” and is “happy in my prime” AND HECK I’VE “EVEN MADE SOME MON’ ”. Gowan Sinéad you beauty, no one will match you and I am sorry for taking you for granted 🤍
Well I thought I’d be saying more but it turned into a big trip down memory lane. My diaries have been woeful recently, I’ve found it so hard to get in the grove plus my notebook is too nice, so I find it very intimidating to start in on a big boring drawing. Im off to All Together Now this weekend so wish me luck for next week. Here’s a sneak peek of a dress I have been working on which I only have a few hours to finish now (hello lastminute.com number 1 subscriber here):
Next time I will be sharing some diary entries from Berlin times, recent trips and memories of past when I lived there briefly in 2013. I’ve been keeping these in a separate notebook because I want to make a specific zine from them, but there are some weird and wonderful bits in there.
Bye for now, love you all, take care, xxx