Finding Her Way Back

After Controversy and Illness, Sinead O'Connor Reconnects to Music

Sinead O'Connor still sports a close-cropped stubble of hair, now graying at the temples. At 40, her voice remains startlingly pure as she ventures out with a new album, a reborn faith in herself and a late-grasped handle on her troubled soul.

With her new CD, "Theology," and a 16-city tour that brings her to Bethesda on Wednesday, O'Connor is reintroducing herself to American audiences 17 years after "Nothing Compares 2 U" shot the Irish singer to the top of the charts here and in 16 other countries. O'Connor also went on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" recently, where, without singing a note, she struck a responsive chord with that show's millions of viewers by talking about how far she'd come back.

In July 2003, O'Connor had closed the book on a career often overshadowed by controversy, much of it self-induced. She silenced herself, selling all her instruments. "I seek no longer to be a 'famous' person, and instead I wish to have a 'normal' life," a statement read. "Could people please afford me my privacy?"

Before the birth of her third child, Shane, the next year, a profound depression had set in and suicidal thoughts O'Connor had experienced for more than a decade seemed to be getting stronger. Despite a succession of therapists and doctors, nobody had any clue what the problem was "until I was at the absolute end of my rope -- pardon the horrible pun," she says.

She admitted herself to a mental hospital, where she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

O'Connor, calling from Dublin, says the disease is like having "a gaping hole" in the center of her being.

The belated diagnosis, she adds, was a "great relief, but it's also very upsetting to find out that you actually have an illness that isn't going to go away. But it's an illness you can . . . learn how to manage. There's gratitude that you finally found out what's wrong with you, and all you have to do is pop these pills every day and you can finally have a life. Not necessarily any happier than the next person but certainly no sadder."

O'Connor describes her medications as "scaffolding to build a proper life." Thankfully, that included a space for creative impulses first nurtured at age 11, when a music teacher handed O'Connor a guitar and a Bob Dylan songbook hoping to draw the shy, withdrawn girl out of her fear-built shell.

The singer has never hidden a history of family turmoil that included an abusive, alcoholic mother and a scandalous divorce in a deeply Catholic country averse to such proceedings. When she was 13, her father became only the second man in Ireland to win custody of his children. Four years later, her mother died in a car crash just as O'Connor was leaving home to pursue a recording career in London, emotionally unprepared for the global success of "Nothing Compares 2 U."

The Prince-penned single and its accompanying video (consisting solely of a close-up of O'Connor's face, gradually tear-streaked) suggested an intensely vulnerable artist. The album that song came from, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," produced a whole lot of "whats" she didn't want, including efforts to turn O'Connor into a rock babe (her response: a shaved head).

Her next album, "Am I Not Your Girl?," a collection of vintage standards, seemed a rejection of pop stardom and slowed O'Connor's commercial momentum. Her October 1992 appearance on "Saturday Night Live" pretty much stopped it in its tracks.

That's the one where, in the midst of an a cappella version of Bob Marley's "War," O'Connor changed the lyric "racism" to "child abuse," shredded a photo of Pope John Paul II and threw the pieces at the camera after saying, "Fight the real enemy." The results: The NBC switchboard was jammed with thousands of complaints, and O'Connor was booed offstage and heckled at subsequent American concerts; radio stopped playing her. Though she remained a star in the United Kingdom and Europe, O'Connor's American profile gradually diminished.