This is maybe the last post in a series of essays about Sinéad O’Connor to celebrate the publication of our book: Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us.

Sinead O'Connor - Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace (with lyrics)

Today we have a beautiful original essay by Marydee Reynolds. Past entries in this series:

• Farah Ahamed’s original essay, “Channel of Peace.”
• Rebecca Evans’ original poem, “Shuhada' Sadaqat.”
• Tamara MC’s original essay, “The Night Sinéad O’Connor Found Me in a Convertible.”
• ’s original essay, “To Mother You”
• Jerry Portwood’s original essay, “Her Eyes Are My Beacon, Her Voice My Guide”
• Rebecca Kuder’s original essay, “Everywhere is War.”
• Noah Berlatsky’s “Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘I Do Not What What I Haven’t Got’ speaks to the fight against Trump from 27 years in the past,” which originally appeared in the Chicago Reader.
• Aimee Seiff Christian’s essay “I loved Sinéad for her wild courage and rage,” which originally appeared on WBUR’s Cognoscenti.
• Shawna Kenney’s original essay, “Feel So Different.”
• ’s essay “Stretched on Her Grave” which originally appeared on her Substack, Off the Record.
• April Nance’s original essay, “Sinéad and Barbie and Me.”
• Emily J. Orlando’s original essay, “‘You Asked for the Truth and I Told You’: For Sinéad”
• Eileen Toomey’s “In Defense of Sinéad O’Connor,” which originally appeared in The Rumpus.
• Jocelyn Jane Cox’s essay “Sinéad O’Connor Helped Me Find My Voice,” which originally appeared in in Sari Botton’s .
• Jeff Dorchen’s essay “Ketch Vampire”
• Erika Meitner’s poem “Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along,” which originally appeared in LitHub.

Don’t Try to Buy Weed in Peoria

Marydee Reynolds

It’s summer in Chicago and it’s hot. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room of my new apartment, talking to José on the phone.

“So listen, Sinéad’s manager is a good friend of mine,” says José.

I’m a recording artist. José works for the label I’m trying to extricate myself from. They’ve lost interest in me due to an ill-advised foray into eco-friendly cassette packaging that cost them millions. My new record was only released because a semi-famous guitarist and friend turned stalker worked on it with me. His recent death by suicide has landed him on the cover of Billboard and CMJ, something he’d always dreamed of.

I feel a glimmer of hope. Record deals are like marriages in Ireland. You can’t just walk away when you want out. If someone at the label lets me go and some other label picks me up, that someone will lose their job.

Has Sinéad come to save me with an opening slot on tour? Does she want to write or sing with me?

José lives in a beach house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. I recently attended a birthday party for an MTV executive there. There was a velvet rope around the beach. A burly guy with lots of tattoos and facial piercings lifted it when I arrived. I imagine José sitting on that beach right now, caught in the crosswinds of cool ocean breezes. Maybe Sinéad will be a modern day Joan of Arc, taking a sword to the radio and marketing departments, freeing me from my chains.

But no, Sinéad is in Peoria and José wants to know if I know anyone there. I try to hide my disappointment, confused. Is Sinéad in need of restaurant recommendations? José is acting squirrelly. Chicago is a restaurant town. No one ever drives to Peoria to go out to eat. And the label never takes me out anymore anyway. Everyone thinks I should capitalize on this rock ‘n roll suicide to sell my record. They find my inability to cooperate in this matter unreasonable.

It's so hot in Chicago that my recently departed stalker once called me in Boston to tell me he’d come home to find all his candles melted. Once he left me a note wishing we could be happily unhappy together. Maybe the heat is going to kill me, just like it killed all those people in Chicago the summer of ‘95, so I can be happily unhappy in heaven or hell, with someone I never wanted to be with at all.

José sighs and gives up his attempts at discretion.

“Marydee it’s 104 degrees in Peoria, Sinéad is in town to take her son to the Insane Clown Posse festival. She needs her herbal medicine.”

It’s the year 2000. Weed is illegal and people don’t like to talk about it on the phone. José was hoping I’d just guess. He tells me that as soon as Sinéad stepped off the plane an airport worker sidled up to her to whisper that it wasn’t safe to buy weed in Peoria. This same warning was repeated by the car service driver and the hotel concierge.

One of my heroines is in trouble, stuck at an Insane Clown Posse festival in 104 degree heat with no weed. I don’t know anyone in Peoria. But I do spend all day, every day, in a recording studio where clouds of marijuana smoke hover close to the ceiling, drifted about by rotating fans. José tells me that Sinéad’s manager can drive to Chicago. He gives me his cell number. I give him the studio’s land line, as I don’t have a cell. Most people don’t. They’re expensive. If you have one everyone will ask to borrow it all the time. And they won’t be around when you get a bill for $637.

I’ve long had Sinéad on a pedestal, quite sure she has never jumped out of a moving cab to get away from a music executive, as I have, or walked backwards in an attempt to keep men from licking her face or burning it with cigarettes. She probably doesn’t search for the exit signs the minute she steps into a room.

I throw all the bad music industry stuff into this trash can in my heart and it’s getting pretty full. I hold myself accountable. If everything is all my fault, then I’m the one who’s in control. If I just work harder I can get to rock’s mythical land of Madame George and Roses, where women like Sinéad reside.

I get a little thrill at the idea of helping her out. It lifts me up from the at-times overwhelming despair.

When I get to the studio I explain Sinéad’s predicament to my friend Van, who has gold and platinum records on the wall, for the Mortal Combat soundtrack and some remixes he did for Bjork. We’re working on a record that will never be released. He shakes his head at the thought of being stuck at an Insane Clown Posse Festival in Peoria in 104 heat with no weed. Sinéad’s manager calls and I give him the address: 1648 S. Kedzie. He has a heavy Cockney accent. It sounds like he’s talking underwater. Van calls this guy who delivers.

I put my headphones on and start to sing. The hours slip away. Sinéad’s manager never calls. We start to worry as it gets close to 5. Another session is coming in. Then the phone rings.

“I got to the address you gave me but the women who answered the door told me to fuck off when I asked for you. When I got back to my rental car I noticed that the side mirrors had disappeared. I stopped at a gas station to ask directions and the woman there said, “Look I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing but you better get out of here now.”

I hand the phone to Van as depression stirs like some dusty old copperhead roused from his sleeping spot under the back porch. I’m forever looking for hooks to hang my pain upon because I don’t have the language to explain anything or ask for help, even from Van, a total sweetheart who actually likes women.

“Damn you sent him to K Town,” says Van. We’re at 1648 W. Kinzie.

In 2010 K Town was added to the national register of historic places. In 2000 it was rife with gang violence, the victim of redlining and pyears of disinvestment.

I’m so glad nobody knows that I thought for a few minutes this morning that Sinéad might want to work with me. I’m the loser of the world. I can’t even score drugs properly.

Sinéad’s manager does finally arrive and we give him lots of weed. I hope he never tells Sinéad I accidently sent him to K Town. I hope the rental car is insured.

It’s 1987 and a friend who owns a magazine called Boston Rock gives me an advance copy of The Lion and the Cobra. I’m wildly ambitious, determined to be a rock star or a hit songwriter. Sometimes I write for the music magazine and sometimes I give voice lessons. I avoid the dreaded day job. But I struggle to be heard in the bands I put together. People say I need more balls though I don’t have any and never will. Sinéad changes all that. I’m an Irish soprano, second generation. My great uncle Bill was a pop star in the 1930s and a member of Sinn Fein. His sister Ann was a singer who ran a restaurant in Antioch that doubled as a speakeasy frequented by mobsters. Some of my family members whisper that she had an affair with an Irish priest who was running guns back to Ireland. Ann and Bill identify as Irish though they were born and raised in Scotland in the aftermath of the Great Famine .

“Working in a bakery doesn’t turn you into a loaf of bread,” screams Ann whenever my grandmother claims to be a Scotswoman. One of my most prized possessions is an ancient silver record of Ann singing “Slievenamon,” the unofficial Irish national anthem.

So singing along with The Lion and the Cobra is easy. It’s as if the angels custom-made a singer just for me, and sent her down to show me the way. I play the tape for all my students. I play it till it breaks. I begin to understand that it’s not the singer’s job to be louder than whatever. It’s the musicians’ job to support the singer.

“It’s like she made it okay for church singers to be in rock bands,” says my friend Jeanine.

It's true, Sinéad opened the door for all kinds of singers to be in rock bands, and my struggles to get a record deal eventually turn into my struggles to get out of a record deal. I’m scarred but I’m no longer just “Aching To Be,” like that young girl in my favorite Replacements song

It’s 2017 and women are talking, and I start to empty that trash can in my heart. I begin to understand that Sinéad has jumped out of the equivalent of a million cabs. Rock has no mythical land of Madame George and Roses.

Sinéad decried the abuses of the Catholic church and the police killings of young Black men long before anyone else did. She pointed out that there’s nothing empowering about a naked 20-year-old licking sledgehammers in a video directed by a serial rapist, as feminists everywhere slammed her for slut shaming, and the pop star in the video made fun of her mental health struggles (because it’s 2013 and you’re still allowed to do that). She even spoke up about Prince (though technically, we’re still not allowed to do that). She paid a terrible price. Fame and money and beauty and talent didn’t protect her.

I start to speak up myself. It feels good in a lot of ways, but I alsoI lose friends and opportunities. I live in fear sometimes. Men on the internet say they sympathize with what I’ve been through when I talk about being stalked and threatened by a now-dead rock star, but when I start to speak up about those that are still alive they say there’s no excuse for character assassination and insinuate that I’m struggling with my own mental health. I’m not

I’m struggling with the repercussions of speaking truth to power.

It’s 2023 and we’ve lost her. She’s gone. Sometimes I think we killed her. We didn’t give back. We didn’t take care of her. Speaking up about abuse can be as painful as the abuse itself. It’s a killing thing. Arrows upon arrows lead to an inevitable bleeding out. Abuse is an infection that worsens over time, and the body keeps the score. It doesn’t matter how she died. It matters that we’re responsible. We never give back to whistleblowers. We sigh and shrug and tell them to get over it. I think about the pain and isolation I experience when I feel compelled to speak up about men in my cultural community who are known to be predatory and multiply it by one hundred million. It’s a wonder we had her as long as we did.

Everyone is posting pictures of Sinéad dressed in the glory of youth. To be a woman in mid-life is an unforgivable thing, even in death. All those pretty pictures from long ago have turned her into America’s favorite thing, a beautiful young dead girl.

It's 2025. She’s been gone for two years. Maybe in her honor we could start to look out for the whistle blowers and the people who intersect with violation through no fault of their own. We could abandon the word “victim” now that it’s become a slur, and think up some other word. We have to fight the culture that wouldn’t let her live. We’re in the middle of a heat wave. And while we might have plenty of legal weed this is no time to get numb. Because we’re all stuck at this Insane Clown Posse festival that just never seems to end. It’s just like Sinéad always said it would be.

Marydee Reynolds is a musician, writer, and vocal therapist currently residing in Chicago. A native New Yorker and graduate of Berklee College of Music, she relocated to the Midwest in the 1990s to record for the legendary Wax Trax label. Her songs have been featured on MTV and in the hit television shows La Femme Nikita and Angel. She has taught thousands of singers from beginners to Grammy-winning recording artists.

Marydee is the great niece of Millie Good, co-founder of The Girls of the Golden West, the first successful all-girl band in country music history. She has just finished a record with her own updated version of the band and is currently working on a memoir, “Post Industrial Rock Disorder, “ about the ways gender based violence is used as a gatekeeper in the music industry.

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xoxoxox

Sonya