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Pitch perfect 2 album songs10/4/2023 In concert, she would sing it with just a 12-string guitar, her voice trembling then crashing like something heavy dropped suddenly from above. On the album, her words are backed by a string section responding to each shift in her inflection. These simple pleasures exist in a different universe than “Troy,” a dark, ambitious ballad with lyrics ranging from Yeats allusion to dragon-killing fantasy, breathless apology to full-throated rage. At the time, she called it a “tongue in cheek song about sex,” and it would eventually receive a dance remix with a verse from MC Lyte about how, despite the seduction in its title, “When I say no, yo, I mean no.” The hook feels almost preverbal as she finds ways to subvert the directness: “Put ’em on, put ’em on, put ’em on me,” O’Connor sings until the words bleed into the rhythm. Before she broke through with a ghostly rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” she sought a different thrill in The Lion and the Cobra’s “I Want Your (Hands on Me).” It’s her rare song that feels modeled after hits of the era, an early attempt at blending her blunt-force, hip-hop influence with gentler melodic gifts. O’Connor never considered herself a pop artist, but she immediately had a knack for getting in people’s heads. You can sing along with every little moment, each placed just so in the soundfield. The song is delivered like a miniature symphony. Even with these flourishes, her voice, double-tracked and coated in reverb, is the center of everything. In the refrain of “Mandinka,” a song about a young woman refusing tradition, the guitar riff rises and falls as drum rolls echo in the right and left channel. In songs like “Mandinka” and “Jerusalem,” the magic is in the interplay between O’Connor’s voice and the bed of cavernous rock music: how she stretches the titles into one-word choruses, weaving the syllables through their knotty arrangements. Even at her most accessible, O’Connor wants you to hear the way she summons this music from the dark, quiet places where it has been buried it floods and calms and stretches beyond our sight, like the sky after a storm. O’Connor has confessed to furnishing the Irish mountaintop home where she lives alone with “deliberately” uncomfortable chairs: “I don’t like people staying long.” Her albums take a similar approach. The Lion and the Cobra, like all of O’Connor’s albums, requires active participation: a listener on the edge of their seat, a hand near the volume knob, a constant feeling of unease. To this day, the best visualization of her gift remains a steady close-up of her face with a tear rolling down her cheek. She would go on to record albums of traditional Irish folk music and roots reggae, transform a Loretta Lynn song into an apocalyptic showtune, rap about the Great Irish Potato Famine, and manage never once to sound ridiculous doing any of it. It has the elucidating quality of light through stained glass but can just as easily become a tempest, shattering windows and leaving the interiors raw and wrecked. Or it was a full-on attack: shoegaze drones, blaring strings, military drums, and dance beats.Īnd then there’s her voice. The accompaniment was often barely there: a wash of ambience, layered acoustic guitars, a Bible passage recited in Gaelic by Enya. Even after she fired the producer and took his place-scrapping the sessions and starting over, putting herself in a hundred-thousand pounds of debt before the album’s release in November 1987-this would be an important lesson in control and self-reliance.
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