NOTHING COMPARES

EVERY serious music buff has a secret love. The unmanageable kind, as expressed in Doris Day’s hit of that name: a passion that lives in the heart of you and grows impatient to be free but awaits those moments when the whole unfurling won’t be too darn embarrassing.

Maybe you’re a metalhead who listens to Diana Krall in your bedroom late at night, or the only person in your group who’s still really into the Black Crowes. Or the object of your affection could be completely acceptable, with only the intensity of feeling getting out of hand. Either way, this kind of devotion to an artist, a musical work or a style is unjustifiable, emotional and fundamentally private.

It’s not the same as a guilty pleasure; that term has been neutered by the prevailing idea that taste is just a matter of perspective and hierarchies are for old men who can’t get over Bob Dylan. Guilty pleasures today don’t involve much guilt; either they’re camp, or they argue for certain ideas -- that the 1970s were underappreciated, for example, or that teen idols can make serious musical statements. Secret loves, on the other hand, argue for nothing. They just persist, and in their resilience, reveal the undefended, perhaps indefensible corners of the heart.

My secret love is Sinead O’Connor. It’s an open secret; when asked about my favorite artists, I might mention her, but I won’t elaborate or offer a rationale. If one of her efforts pops up on my year-end best-of list, I like to think others would find it exceptional too. But the truth is that I love everything O’Connor does, even her missteps.

In the 1980s, O’Connor stood for defiant post-punk femininity, her shaved head and glorious wail signaling a new way to feel freedom. But after her one major international hit, her 1990 version of the Prince-penned “Nothing Compares 2 U,” O’Connor became a difficult case. She ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 “Saturday Night Live” appearance, making herself an outcast among mainstream entertainers without making clear the reason for her heresy. (She was protesting the church’s then-surfacing sexual child-abuse scandals.) From there the controversies multiplied, and it became awkward to be her fan.

She bore four children by four fathers. She was ordained as a priest within a Catholic splinter group but refused to share details of her vocation. Interviews became an occasion for her to say something outrageous -- that she was a lesbian or that she would retire. Now she’s releasing “Theology,” her second album since she announced she would record only “inspirational” music -- the first was a collection of Rastafarian-influenced reggae songs.

This double-disc set is likely to gain her few new listeners. Its lyrics come straight from the Old Testament, thick with images of vineyards and voices raised to a vengeful God. The music, half Irish traditional and half gentle rock, contains few hooks or concessions to fashion. Most songs appear twice, as if O’Connor can’t stand the thought of her Word not being fully absorbed. None of it’s accessible, unless you’ve got your King James Version on the bed stand. It’s not the soft-pedaled, feel-good stuff that fills most mega-churches, either; though O’Connor has expressed hope that religious people will find her music, she’s not conceding to contemporary Christian trends either.

“Theology” is exactly the kind of release I treasure from O’Connor, though I’d never try to push it on a skeptic. That would entail contextualization, and there’s nothing in this music that expresses the desire for that.

This is pretty much how I’ve felt about O’Connor’s music for 15 years. The beauty I hear in it has nothing to do with what’s hip, or great, or even relevant in the big pop world. What I hear is a mind resolute on understanding things I’d like to understand too.

Worry-free music

O’CONNOR doesn’t worry about whether contemplating subjects like spiritual yearning or political oppression in clear and uncompromising language makes her seem like a blowhard. She just makes the music she makes, from her own questions. As a critic -- someone who spends way too much time second-guessing artists’ motivations -- I love that O’Connor’s are so forthright, unguarded and singular. I like that she doesn’t seem to want someone like me to make excuses for her.

I vividly remember the first time I heard O’Connor singing. It was 1987. I was in bed, waking up alone in the ramshackle Victorian flat I shared with several like-minded weirdos in San Francisco. The morning show on KUSF, my neighborhood college radio station, buzzed from the clock radio nearby.

Out of nowhere came this voice. Over gradually building strings and drums, O’Connor muttered, her words hot and sorrowful -- overdramatic, yet exacting, in the way that only belongs to youth. Her words described jealousy, a lost lover, an unquenchable need. “I’d kill a dragon for you, I’ll die!” she screamed. This was romantic unreasonableness personified -- something I understood deeply, being 23. The song was “Troy,” from O’Connor’s 1987 debut “The Lion and the Cobra.”

It seemed custom-made for me, a lapsed Catholic, creative-writing major stumbling from one bad romance to another. Its title was a slap at the beautiful paternalism of William Butler Yeats’ poem “No Second Troy.” The dragon-killing line reclaimed the chivalric tradition of St. George, handing that spear to a woman. The sound combined punk’s fury with pop melodiousness. I rushed out that day and got the album; that night I discovered all the other ways O’Connor spoke my truth.

Or so I would have said then. At 23, I thought absolute truth was a viable concept. Since then, I’ve come to believe that ambiguity and change are all you can really count on. But O’Connor’s music has remained a touchstone.

It comes down to this: For O’Connor, everything is personal. It’s not just that her songs often make startlingly specific reference to her own life but that her ego is swollen enough, or her vision empathetic enough, to take on huge subjects and own them. “This Is a Rebel Song,” from her 1997 “Gospel Oak” EP, is a beautiful example; set to a mournful Irish melody, it transforms the long history of England’s occupation of Ireland into a plea from a likely pregnant woman that her soldier lover recognize her. “Your rage is like a fist in my womb,” sings O’Connor, the famous mother. This is politics so deeply internalized that it bleeds.

Music tells O’Connor’s story, connecting it to the Big Stories that preoccupy her. The leaps she makes can seem unbelievably presumptuous when enacted by a pop star -- how dare she compare herself to Joan of Arc, as she has in the past, or Job, as she does on “Theology”? But that’s what we all do, in our unchecked dreams. I admire O’Connor for not disguising the process through which she’s learned to feel, and to believe in whatever she believes.

The audience is listening

O’CONNOR made her first L.A. appearance in a decade last week at the Silent Movie Theatre, appearing for two nights with only two bandmates -- Caroline Dale on cello and Bill Shanley on guitar -- and playing the “Theology” set almost in its entirety. She presented the songs without fuss, articulating ancient narratives in a plain-spoken, contemporary voice. She sang about her Lord saving her from “any Babylon crap.” The small crowd, wrapped up in the majestic grace of her singing, cheered every prayer and admonition.

O’Connor responded with dimply grins and a few one-liners, joking gently about the mess in the Middle East before “If You Had a Vineyard,” her lamentation on the subject. She’d raised the right mood in her accompanists on one song by telling them to respond as if their dogs had died. Funny, but the song itself -- “Rivers of Babylon,” the Melodians’ classic rocksteady rewrite of Psalm 137 -- was as bereft as O’Connor demanded. Again, she took the old story into herself; in the popular versions by the Melodians and Boney M, the song’s mourners are a group, a “we,” but O’Connor changed that plural pronoun to “I,” making the sorrow of exile so lonesome you couldn’t help but cry.

O’Connor performed beautifully throughout her short set, exuding grace even when she fumbled her guitar runs, but even if she’d been less genial, I doubt the audience would have been anything but rapt. I could feel it; this was a crowd of secret lovers. For the night we were together, sharing our fervor without raising any signs or even (except for one irrepressible woman) yelling requests. Such displays would have violated something: our pact with O’Connor to remain steadfast, perhaps; our pact with each other to keep the privacy of our fanship intact.

What do our secret loves prove? Not the tastes we share and debate; not our place in the world. Instead, this intensity connects to the aspects of ourselves we don’t totally choose. They point toward the sweet-or-salty preferences that brain chemistry determines, and the web of affinities that begin in childhood and unfold over a lifetime. Secret loves explain why many of us turned to art in the first place, as a refuge, a defining factor, a motivational force. They’re worth revealing.

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ann.powers@latimes.com