On and off during those years, which included her conversion, the publication of her memoir, and a premature announcement about retiring from music, O’Connor would always drive up alone from Bray, and she and Holmes went to work setting those songs to music. “She said, ‘It takes me a while to write a song, but when it’s finished, it’ll be worth it.’ I made a decision that I was never going to to push her. “It was very much an album she made when she was ready,” he says. She also seemed in no rush to re-enter a business that often repulsed her. When work on a full album with Holmes got underway, O’Connor would send Holmes texts of bare-boned new songs with just her voice and acoustic guitars. And as a producer, I always felt that Sinéad hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was possible with her voice.” But I said I wanted to make a record about healing since I’ve had my own issues with mental health, and music was always a comfort. “She didn’t know anything about me, really. “She was walking to where I was standing, and I introduced myself,” Holmes says. But they finally had a chance to speak at a 60th birthday party for the Pogues’ Shane McGowan around 2017. Holmes, the renowned Irish DJ and producer who has scored films (the Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels among them) and made pioneering EDM albums like Let’s Get Killed, first met O’Connor briefly at an awards show in the late Nineties. According to Holmes, the eight-song album - which he describes as “emotional and really personal” - was one track away from completion when O’Connor died. On July 11, just two weeks before she was found unresponsive in her new home in London, O’Connor announced that she would “soon be finishing my album.” The record, No Veteran Dies Alone, had been in the works for about five years and would have been O’Connor’s first since 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss. “Do you have time?” If Holmes did, O’Connor would then take the nearly three-hour drive from her home in Bray, the Irish coastal town where she was then living, to continue work on what would be the last album of her life. “Are you around?” Sinéad O’Connor would say. The calls to producer David Holmes’ Belfast home studio arrived sporadically, sometimes a week or a mere few days in advance.
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