Anyone who knows Sinead, knows that she is self centered, insecure and has occasional ‘spells’ of deep, dark paranoia. We also know that she is a talented vocalist, or has been one.
Try to put her Looney-Tune persona aside for one moment.
I can see some of this happening. Prince too was a known narcissist, who dabbled (heavily!!) into recreational drugs.
From what I’ve read about Prince the musician, he was a Prima Donna, used to special treatment. I heard that he
‘Summoned’ Sinead to his studio at near 1AM. To talk about her recording, is what he said. In spite of the success of that song, Prince is said to have been displeased with the way she sang it.
For the small group of people who care to think about it that long; Sinead sang the song as she spontaneously chose to do. A good singer can do that, play around on the trapeze of octaves and pronunciations. She pulled it off.
In several moments, (to my untrained ear) it sounds like Sinead is singing in flat whole notes, with almost no modulation, even bordering on singing off key.
She employs what resembles a Gospel way of singing and yelling the notes at once, with volume becoming the modulator. Alicia Keys does this now. Alicia is a fine pianist, but sometimes I think in a prior life, she must have lived on a farm and called hogs with that voice. This is partially what Prince didn’t like. That, along with knowing her cover of that tune was a mega-hit. His own recording of that song is largely unknown. In some ways, Prince was like the folk singer Jackson Brown, in that his better known tunes were often those sung by other people, not by him, the songwriter.
I was with you up until “better known hits were the ones sung by other people.”
Prince had 16 platinum albums. Purple Rain was 13x platinum. He was huuuuuge for a 5 foot 1 inch man.