Sinead O'Connor Talks About Sex

The new album was originally titled Home, but after a very public year, O'Connor realized the name needed to change. The musician had been particularly visible, writing about sex and relationships on her personal blog with such frankness that she garnered thousands of fans who weren't familiar with her before.

An unfiltered O'Connor has blossomed in social media. "I was trying to get in touch with that part of me, actually. Perhaps it is easier just to share who the real you is nowadays because you can do shit like Twitter and blogging and everything." For O'Connor, this meant spending a lot of 2011 talking about sex, a topic that's still rather taboo in her home country. This new platform brought out some critics in the Irish media who attacked her for humorously discussing anal sex, masturbation, and her theory on how mandatory interracial sex could solve racism in Ireland.

When did she decide that it was OK to just be herself? "I was 44," laughs the 45-year-old crooner.

"It was actually as a result of writing those articles about sex...and people's response to it," she says. "I had another title for the album originally, but when I was dealing with all of that, I was lying in bed at night and it just seemed to cross my mind. I am just [tired] of opinions of what one should be and one shouldn't fucking be, you know? And everyone's busy ramming them down your throat and no one knows how to be themselves, and I'm figuring, well, there can't be any harm here [in being myself]."

"Can I tell you a really funny story?" she asks, on a break during her recent U.S. tour. "One of my friends has a sister who...was about 68 at the time. She had this horrible husband, and he had a job in Copenhagen and he'd come home on weekends. He came back one weekend, spent the weekend shagging her, and then announced he had another woman in Copenhagen and he wouldn't be coming back. So she's all brokenhearted, but eventually she got her shit together...and she met another feller. And the next thing you know she's having a heart attack. They get her into the fucking hospital and she's in there for about a week. They've got her hooked up to everything, done every test they can, they cannot find any evidence of a heart attack or what the fuck's wrong with her." O'Connor pauses to laugh, an unbridled chortle.