A Collection That Truly Is O’Connor’s Best

**** SINEAD O’CONNOR

“So Far . . . the Best of Sinead O’Connor”

Chrysalis

The real question with this single-disc “best of” collection isn’t so much the usual one of quality, but whether it’s ultimately even necessary.

As a writer and singer, O’Connor injects her work with such passion and purpose that you’d think anyone who’d be interested in her music would want all four of her studio collections, not simply a sample of them.

Ever since the Irish artist made her album debut with “The Lion and the Cobra” in 1988, she has been one of the most commanding figures in all of pop. There is even something warmly revealing about her 1992 collection, “Am I Not Your Girl?,” which simply featured O’Connor’s interpretation of a variety of pop ballads, including “Secret Love” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

Much like some of her own musical influences, including Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, O’Connor is part musician and part missionary. A victim of child abuse, she writes in much of her music about the social conditions that lead to such abuse and the psychological consequences of it.

Much of her strength is her ability to write about the issues from the standpoint of individual relationships and then frame other songs in a larger social setting.

Listening to her heavily orchestrated reworking of the old Loretta Lynn country hit “Success Has Made a Failure Out of Our Home,” you know O’Connor has turned the song into a far more biting social commentary than Lynn surely had in mind. The song, from the “Am I Not” album, is one of 15 included in “So Far.”

If you are convinced, however, that you just want one O’Connor album, this is a rewarding choice--a generous and well-chosen 78-minute excursion through O’Connor’s body of work, from her breakthrough hit rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” to the biting “Fire on Babylon” from 1994’s “Universal Mother” album. The package also includes two songs that previously appeared only on soundtracks.

Even the liner notes to “So Far” are in the spirit of O’Connor’s highly personal songwriting style--a tender memoir by John Walters, the Irish journalist who is the father of O’Connor’s 2-year-old daughter, Roisin.

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