The ballad of Sinéad O'Connor

Sinéad O’Connor is sick of people thinking she’s lost her mind. ”You’re treated like s— if you’re perceived as crazy,” says the 45-year-old singer, who’s preparing to release her ninth studio album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? As that defensive title suggests, she believes she’s been treated very badly, especially since Dec. 8. That’s when the mother of four married drug counselor Barry Herridge in a pink Cadillac in Las Vegas, and ended up buying crack on her wedding night. (O’Connor, who doesn’t drink, said she had wanted to buy marijuana but the dealer mistakenly handed her something stronger.) Caving to pressure from Herridge’s family, the couple broke up just weeks later, on Christmas Eve.

The whole experience sent O’Connor into a very public tailspin. She was still capable of giving performances so emotionally vivid that she had ”the power to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck” (as one critic said of a series of comeback performances she gave in Manchester, England, last year). But suddenly she seemed to be letting those emotions get the best of her. Since last fall, she has taken to revealing explicit details about her life to her thousands of Twitter followers, posting that she’d been considering having sex with fruits and vegetables (she later insisted she was joking) or confessing that a male fan had offered to hook up with her while wearing a mask of Pope John Paul II, whose photo she famously tore up on Saturday Night Live in 1992.

But after her split from Herridge, her tone got far more serious. On Jan. 11, she revealed that she had tried to commit suicide the previous week by overdosing on pills, and was thinking about trying again. ”Does [anyone] know a psychiatrist in Dublin or Wicklow who could urgently see me today please?” she pleaded on Twitter. ”I’m really unwell and in danger. And I desperately need to get back on meds today.”

After fans responded with doctor referrals, O’Connor checked herself into a hospital. Since then, she’s been treating her depression with prescription drugs. But it’s clear that she’s not through baring everything for her fans: Feb. 20 will mark the release of How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, a deeply affecting and confessional record — and easily her best work in years.

For her London-based record label One Little Indian, O’Connor’s openness about her personal issues isn’t a problem. ”Sinéad’s strong and sometimes outspoken views are something that should be applauded for a woman in such a male-dominated business,” says Colin Wallace, who handles the label’s international A&R and promotions. Still, it’s a little heartbreaking that the album includes two songs about marriage, both of them blissfully happy. ”I’m gonna marry my love/And we’ll be happy for all time,” O’Connor vows on the upbeat acoustic jam ”4th and Vine,” before the song explodes into a giddy chorus of ”I will, I will, I will, I will” and ”I do, I do, I do, I do.”

You get the sense that this is a woman with so much love to give, but few people close to her are strong enough to withstand it all. ”4th and Vine” was actually written about a wedding that never happened. The lyrics were inspired not by Herridge but by O’Connor’s previous boyfriend, Frank Bonadio — the father of her youngest child, 5-year-old Yeshua — who was separated from his then wife when he and O’Connor met. On the moving single-mother anthem ”I Had a Baby,” O’Connor imagines how growing up without his father might affect her son: ”I had a fling with/A man that wasn’t mine to be with…. But I had a baby…. I don’t know why he should suffer instead of me…. I wish I wasn’t so crazy.” Asked about the wedding scene in ”4th and Vine,” O’Connor confesses, ”There were one or two songs that I wrote hoping they might come true.”

At times, How About I Be Me feels uncomfortably dark. ”Reason With Me” is a haunting ballad written from the perspective of a heroin addict who’s hawked a stranger’s television for drugs. Even the cries for help are eerie: ”I’m gonna call that number one of these days,” O’Connor intones on the track. ”It’s not too late.”

O’Connor will tell you that this is just good storytelling. ”To understand me as an artist, it’s impossible to put aside my Irishness,” she says, her voice husky from the flu she’s still getting over. ”Most of my behavior could be traceable back to a tradition, which has existed for centuries, of Irish artists being terribly concerned about how their society is run.” Indeed, she’s always used her music as a platform for speaking up about social issues, from her faith (she became a priest in 1999) to her sexuality (she outed herself as a lesbian in 2000, though five years later she amended that claim, telling Entertainment Weekly, ”I’m three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”) to her unconventional approach to motherhood (her children come from four different fathers). Her somber new song ”V.I.P.” stresses how spiritually bankrupt fame can make you. ”50 Cent’s album is called Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” she says. ”That’s exactly the result of it.”

Certainly her own relationship with fame continues to trouble her. After her split from Herridge, the press covered her mercilessly, mocking her weight and her mental state. But she says she and Herridge are trying to work things out. And she still wants to be able to share her feelings with her fans.

”In a way, my records are diaries,” she says. ”And if you listen to this record from the beginning through, hopefully you will hear it end joyfully. It was a journey towards happiness.” So is she happy now? ”I’ve been through a hellish, unpleasant time,” she says. ”But I’ll get there.”