Better Things: Troy

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is another big one - one of the handful of songs that I kept trying to fit into the original This Year series, and it just didn't go. But it was a song I loved and was awestruck by from the first time I heard it - I think a whole generation of us heard it, probably on MTV, and were struck immediately by its power and raw force.

Sinead O'Connor had a long, complicated, winding career. She made a lot of great music, and lived a tumultuous life in public probably more than was good for her. She wore her heart on her sleeve - no, even more than that, she ripped her chest open metaphorically, over and over, to show her most vulnerable side in her music.

And never more so than in her first great song, her debut single.

This week, it's Troy.

Full of devastating lines, full of deep insights. Full of pointed lines sung by one woman to one other person - I think, in the context of the song, a man, though O'Connor said later in her life Troy had other origins than the broken-love story it tells.

You wouldn't have begged me to hold you
If we hadn't been there in the first place

It's a song of regret and anger, of stalking around the ashes of something definitively burned to the ground and describing how it came to be that way.

We were so young then
We thought that everything
We could possibly do was right

Some break-up songs are about what the singer did wrong; some are about how she was wronged by the one she's singing to. Troy circles accusations and confessions, over and over - it's never clear what happened or how, but it sounds like the other person was two-timing the singer and it's just recently come out:

Oh, does she love you
What do you want to do?
Does she need you like I do?
Do you love her?
Is she good for you?
Does she hold you like I do?
Do you want me?
Should I leave?

O'Connor sings all of this like an avenging angel, going from full-force - and her voice, at its peak, had force like no one else - to barely whispered, sometimes in the space of a single line, as the orchestral background rises and falls to match. It's a big song in every way - big instruments, big emotions, big themes, aiming as high as humanly possible and hitting right where it wants to. If you've never hear it before, buckle in - you're in for a hell of a ride.