xLike Nilsson, Bryan Ferry, and precious few others, Sinéad O’Connor triumphed as a covers artist because she didn’t surrender to the material: she absorbed and melted it like lava on a hillside. Yesterday I praised a few of those covers. I have less time, interestingly, for Am I Not Your Girl?, released a couple years after the peak of her fame; she sounded uncomfortable with the material; only “Secret Love” and “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” register as O’Connor performances as opposed to auditions.
On the traditional “Lord Franklin” her lower register projects a yearning for the lost husband so palpable that I can smell the brine and the commemorative flowers. John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark,” not the first cover I would’ve imagined, benefits from her deepened vocal, which suits the no-bullshit lyric (“I wanted to change the world/But I could not even change my underwear”). And she’s terrific handling the reggae exigencies of Burning Spear.
A partial list, then, but I’m looking for education.
1. Nothing Compares 2 U
2. You Do Something for Me
3. Ain’t It A Shame
4. Sacrifice
5. All Apologies
6. Lord Franklin
7. Dagger Through the Heart
8. She Moved Through the Fair
9. Secret Love.
10. Queen of Denmark
11. He Prayed
12. Fairytale of New York
Humanizing The Vacuum 
The one omission here is the astonishing ‘Fire On Babylon’ EP from December 1994, with its impressively desolate and defiant versions of ‘I Believe In You’, ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ and ‘Streets Of London’. All three are interpreted in a similar vein to ‘All Apologies’.
I’m also fond of her version of ‘Silent Night’ that conspicuously failed to become a Christmas hit in 1991.