Sinéad O’Connor died Wednesday at the age of 56 — and according to a 2021 People Magazine interview, the acclaimed Irish singer had warned her children exactly what to do in the event that she “died suddenly.”
O’Connor explained at the time that because the value of an artist’s work often goes up after death, she had taught her children the importance of protecting her art — and the financial stability it could bring them — before they even contacted emergency services.
“See, when the artists are dead, they’re much more valuable than when they’re alive. Tupac has released way more albums since he died than he ever did alive, so it’s kind of gross what record companies do,” O’Connor told the outlet.
“That’s why I’ve always instructed my children since they were very small, ‘If your mother drops dead tomorrow, before you called 911, call my accountant and make sure the record companies don’t start releasing my records and not telling you where the money is,'” she continued.
The conversation began with the late musician Prince – whose song “Nothing Compares 2 U” topped the Billboard charts when O’Connor recorded it — and the way she said his record label had profited from releasing his music after he died in 2016.
“One of the things that’s a great bugbear with me, I get very angry when I think of it, is the fact that they’re raping his vault,” she said, arguing that it took away the artist’s agency to have record labels releasing music posthumously that the artist might not have ever wanted seeing the light of day.
“All musicians, we have songs that we really are embarrassed about that are crap. We don’t want anyone hearing them. Now this is a man who released every song he ever recorded, so if he went to the trouble of building a vault, which is a pretty strong thing to do, that means he really did not want these songs released. And I can’t stand that people are, as I put it, raping the vault,” O’Connor continued, using as a prime example the fact that Prince’s 1984 song “Let’s Go Crazy” had been made the soundtrack for a credit card commercial.
“That’s a song about appreciation, friendship, and love and not the material things in life. It’s a song about, ‘Look, we could die anytime now. Let’s love each other and appreciate.’ I think he will be turning in his grave over it being used to sell a credit card,” she said.
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O’Connor is survived by three of her four children, and had been struggling with her mental health for years prior to her death. That struggle was only exacerbated in January of 2022 when her 17-year-old son Shane ended his own life after escaping from suicide watch at a local hospital.
The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a free hotline for individuals in crisis or distress or for those looking to help someone else. It is available 24/7 at 988.