Smash hit

What seems clear is that she’s now in a far happier place. She dotes on all of her children, but Yeshua was born with life-threatening pneumonia and spent his first ten days in hospital, making him seem all the more precious. And while there have been conflicts with her children’s four fathers in the past, she says it now works surprisingly well. “We’re all really good friends, everybody is very casual with everybody else.” She doesn’t yet live with Yeshua’s dad, American businessman Frank Bonadio, but they see each other most days and spend weekends together. She says he was a strong support both through their son’s illness and her own, despite carrying on rather public rows with his estranged wife, the singer Mary Coughlan, at the same time.

“He’s got two kids as well; their marriage broke up a couple of years ago, and we don’t want to rush the kids into a family situation,” she explains. “We’re just taking our time. Letting all the kids get to know each other better. Plus we need to actually date and court each other. See, we knew we were going to stay together, so we just figured we’d better have the baby now because I’ll be too old in a few years. So it’ll be lovely to go to sleep with him every night, but it’s also nice not to live together, because you kind of miss each other.”

Over the years, the thing that has perhaps been most misunderstood about O’Connor – or most difficult to understand – is her exploration of spirituality, her search for a connection to a higher power. Since this is the theme of Theology, we talk for a while about growing up Catholic in Ireland, but also about her interest in Judaism and the idea of a more direct relationship with God. When she moved to London in her late teens, she met Rastafarians who read the Bible daily, saw reggae as an expression of their faith and were largely against organised religion. She has also studied Kabbalah, spiritualism, Gregorian chant, Sufi poets, and back in Dublin, enrolled in college to study theology. All of this emerges in the new songs, although the one thing she won’t discuss is her ordination as a priest of the breakaway “Independent Catholic” church in the mid-Nineties – “That’s something that’s mine alone,” she says firmly. But when I ask if she will ever preach, she is horrified. “God no! I don’t believe in preaching.”

If she calls her new album religious music, she explains, it is not because she was trying to convert anyone to her point of view, but because she was striving for the kind of feeling she once got when singing in the church choir as a child. “It’s a very gentle thing. I guess the best way I can describe it is total hippy talk, really. It’s as if you had a big warm belt of air around you. Rock’n’roll music is great, but you’re giving it out. When you’re doing this, you feel like something is actually coming into you, nurturing you.”

There are two versions of the songs, on separate CDs: the Dublin sessions were mainly recorded in a flat she rented close to her house, with O’Connor accompanying herself on acoustic guitar; the London sessions have been given the full studio treatment by R&B pop producer Ron Tom. What unites both versions is that they seem to be coming from a place of peace, rather than anger: they are songs for meditation, for contemplation, making full use of her pure, strong voice. “I wanna make something beautiful for you”, she sings at one point, and though the album is far from perfect, she largely succeeds.

It won’t be a huge hit, and O’Connor doesn’t expect or even want that. She talks happily about promoting it until October, then retiring back to be with her family, to write new songs and plan what might come next. She can do this because this time round she has kept control, financing the recording herself and licensing the album out to record labels in each territory. The music industry is changing radically, and while CD sales in general are plummeting, it has never been easier for an artist to find a niche and make a living by speaking directly to their fans. There’s still a place for her songs of quiet beauty and passion, and perhaps Sinéad O’Connor finally has found a place where she can be at peace.

“I love being 40,” she said when we were talking about her new maturity. “It’s funny because I wasn’t expecting to feel anything about my birthday, I didn’t care about it at all. But you know how people go on about life beginning at 40? That’s how I really felt. I was surprised about that being true. But it really did feel like a new beginning.”

Theology is released on Rubyworks on June 25

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