Sinead O'Connor says she's retiring from making music and touring

By Sam Barsanti | June 6, 2021 | 8:37pm

Music News Sinead O'Connor

Sinead O'Connor says she's retiring from making music and touring

Sinead O’Connor in 2012 Photo: Jason Kempin

As reported by Billboard, Sinead O’Connor announced on her Twitter page this weekend that she’s going to retire from “touring and from working in the record business,” explaining that she has “gotten older” and that “a wise warrior knows when he or she should retreat.” She says her upcoming album No Veteran Dies Alone, apparently scheduled for 2022, will be her last release and that there will be no more touring or promotional work. She also confirmed that this means previously scheduled dates—previously set for 2020 but then bumped to this year and next year—will not be happening. She added that she’s sorry if making an announcement like this on Twitter is going to cause problems for booking agents and promoters, but working on her new memoir Rememberings convinced her that she’s her “own boss” and that she no longer wants to wait on “permission from the men.” (She also noted that she’d “had a few whiskeys.”)

This news comes a few weeks after O’Connor raised new abuse allegations against Prince, who wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” (which became O’Connor’s biggest hit). She says she was “terrorized” by him and has mentioned some sort of violent encounter in the past, going on to explain an encounter in which he hit her with “something hard” in a pillowcase and then “stalked her with his car” when she eventually ran off. Those allegations actually came up while O’Connor was promoting Rememberings, during which she also talked about how being a pop star is “almost like being in a type of prison.” That was in reference to her decision to tear up a photo of Pope John Paul II on SNL, but it also seems like writing and then promoting this book was a cathartic experience that convinced her she didn’t need to deal with certain things anymore