All My CDs, pt 90: I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got - Sinead O’Conner


Here’s an album I pilfered from my mother’s collection (sorry) in my early teens. I remember just being bored with the music I had, but without the cash to buy more, so I found this on a shelf and put it on. I listened with my usual adolescent obsessiveness for a good few months, came to know many of the songs like they lived in my own heart, but never became curious about what else the artist had produced. Later, like so many other CDs I loved as a teenager, it fell by the wayside and I all but forgot it existed.

When I started listening to it again, after more than a decade, I found that the music was exactly as I remember it, and my enjoyment of it has neither changed nor decreased. It’s still as emotionally evocative, as variable in style and mood, and as good. The only real difference is that it’s not new anymore. I would have expected that so many years of experience, some of it directly relevant to the songs’ content, would change the way I relate to the music. Yet this has not been the case, even with the couple of breakup songs on the album.

The only possible exception is The Emperor’s New Clothes, which I enjoy about as much, but might be getting more appreciation out of the lyrics nowadays. No clue why, since I can’t pick out anything I particularly relate to in there.

My favorite track was and remains Feel So Different, which opens the album and isn’t topped by any that follow it. It begins with the spoken Serenity prayer (my first exposure to that particular prayer, back when I first played this album as a teenager). From there, it layers thickly portentous lyrics over a background of slowly-building strings, hinting at but never outright explaining some great personal revelation:

The whole time I’ve never seen
all I need  was inside me
now I feel so different

It’s a total twelve-car pileup of cliches, I know, but I love it anyway. The vagueness makes it easy to just imagine that it’s about whatever’s making you feel so different, and that makes it easier to just get swept up in the emotionality of it. For some reason other songs that are similarly built just don’t do the same thing for me. Maybe because of how young I was when I encountered this one. Maybe because this is an especially well-crafted example of the technique. Or maybe, since this isn’t a popular song that gets played on the radio, I can relish the illusion that the song is mine alone.

Whatever the reason, I like the song. The rest of the album is okay, but doesn’t quite reach the same level with me.

Next: Falling Farther In