# Track Thirteen
*Sinéad O'Connor and the Difference Between a Hearing and a Publication* — Legendary Biographies No. 262

- **Subject:** Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor
- **Written by:** Linus Crane
- **Shelf:** Music / Rock
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 246 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-542-8)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-651-7)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/262-track-thirteen.html

## About this book

Three things here are contested and the book does not settle them: whether An Grianán belongs on the state's schedule of Magdalen institutions, the diagnosis Sinéad O'Connor disclosed in 2007 and later disputed herself, and what ended her American career. The versions are set out and left standing. Her mother's house is described in testimony there is nobody left to check it against.

What is not contested sits on a disc. Am I Not Your Girl? has twelve songs printed on the sleeve and thirteen on the record. The thirteenth is not sung. It is spoken, it runs two minutes, and its subject is the abuse of children. Because it was not on the listing, nobody played it, nobody reviewed it, and nobody asked her about it. Nineteen days later she stood in Studio 8H, sang "War" unaccompanied with one word altered, held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II she had taken off her dead mother's bedroom wall, and tore it into four pieces. It took about eight seconds. NBC counted 4,484 complaints against 725 calls of support.

She was not making a gesture. She was giving evidence, and she gave it loudly only because she had already given it quietly and nothing came back. At fifteen she had spent eighteen months inside the Grianán Training Centre at Drumcondra, on the grounds of High Park, where the order also ran a Magdalen laundry. In 1993 that congregation applied to exhume one hundred and thirty-three graves there. One hundred and fifty-five bodies came out of the ground. Over the next twenty years the state published, on its own paper, substantially what she had said in eight seconds. She was alive for all of it, and it did not vindicate her, because being agreed with and being believed are different events.

This is not a canonization, and it says so at the front. The same instrument produced an accusation retracted under a defamation suit, and records that were not good. Track thirteen is still where she left it, unlisted, two minutes long, spoken rather than sung.

## Contents

1. Glenageary, 1966
2. Her Mother's House
3. An Grianán
4. Waterford, and the Photograph
5. Heroine
6. Psalm 91
7. One Take, One Face
8. The Anthem and the Statuette
9. Track Thirteen
10. Eight Seconds
11. Madison Square Garden
12. What Was Under High Park. 1993
13. Famine
14. Mother Bernadette Mary. 1995-2000
15. Sean-Nós
16. Kingston
17. An Apology Is Not an Accounting
18. The Verdict
19. The Years Nobody Wants in the Film
20. Shuhada'
21. Rememberings, and Shane
22. Herne Hill

## Questions

**Who is Track Thirteen about?**

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Track Thirteen — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,898 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 76,000 words, 22 chapters, 246 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Linus Crane began at the NME in 1986 and spent the next thirty years writing British rock for British music magazines that no longer exist. His long-form biographies of Joe Strummer, Vivian Stanshall and Richard Thompson are interested in the second album, the divorce, and the difficult late period. He writes from Hebden Bridge.