Everyone in the world knows whose photo Sinéad O’Connor ripped up on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992. Hardly anybody recalls why she was there in the first place.
The Irish singer and songwriter, whose death at age 56 was announced July 26, famously nuked her career that night when she punctuated an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s song “War” by tearing a picture of Pope John Paul II into shreds as an act of protest against the church’s sexual abuse of children.
But what had gotten O’Connor booked on “SNL” that October was actually its own form of professional self-immolation: the release just days earlier of her third studio album, “Am I Not Your Girl?,” a collection of old songs — standards, if we’re defining that term loosely — on which she was backed by an orchestra of several dozen players. (Before she sang “War” on “SNL,” she promoted the LP by doing a version of its “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home,” a country hit in the early 1960s for Loretta Lynn.)
I suppose I can understand why O’Connor’s team might have thought this idea might play. Two years before, Madonna had gone big band to double-platinum success with her album “I’m Breathless,” which accompanied her role as Breathless Mahoney in Warren Beatty’s Hollywood adaptation of “Dick Tracy.” Two years later, Tony Bennett would make a splashy commercial comeback with the Grammy-winning “MTV Unplugged,” on which he pulled from the same Great American Songbook that provided O’Connor with some of her repertoire.