Irish music producer David Holmes has revealed that he was working on an unfinished album with Sinéad O’Connor before her death.
Holmes, when paying tribute to O’Connor via a social media post, said that the pair had completed eight songs, with an unfinished ninth track due to be completed in September.
Of the songs that were finished, “each one [was] as powerful as the next”, said Holmes on Instagram. He went on to pay tribute to O’Connor, calling her a “disrupter, a dreamer, an outsider and outlier, radical, upsetter, the high priestess of Irish soul and punk, incredibly intelligent, ridiculously kind and so f*cking funny”.
Holmes said that “every time I recorded her in my studio it was a pinch yourself moment”, before comparing her to the likes of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Karen Dalton. Referencing her appearance on Saturday Night Live where O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II, Holmes said that O’Connor was “light years in advance of her time” and that she “spoke truth to power and was cancelled for it”.
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Holmes said that he met O’Connor at Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday celebration in 2018, telling her that he wanted to “make a record with her about healing”.
“To my surprise her ears pricked up and after a quick chat she gave me her number not having a clue who I was. I’ll never forget that moment and how tickled she was – fully endorsing my brass neck. That was Sinéad. We stayed in touch and over the course of the next five years we somehow made that record.”
