Music producer David Holmes says Sinéad O’Connor had finished eight songs for new album

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.”