…and he’s registered at Cabela’s!
[Video][Website]
[7.33]
Andrew Ryce: Sinéad O’Connor has to be one of the only artists whose ‘comeback’ from notoriety is even more fucked up than she used to be. Nevertheless, her double-tracked voice sounds more fragile than ever, a reminder that no matter what you might think of her Sinead has never been anything less than transparent. The production is a little distressingly MOR adult contemporary rock, but what else would you expect? There’s something exhilarating about the change in her voice from the first verse to the second, as she sings “Your laugh makes me laugh” and practically yells “Your joy gives me joy.” If you’ve heard the rest of the album, you’ll know this story doesn’t end well, but this standalone nugget of bliss is too giddy for that to matter.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Does it matter that this song was written as a desperate move to retain a lover, and to have that lover leave? Sinead’s new album’s theological phrasing fits in the midst of Fat Tuesday and Ashen Wednesday, between the fucking in the bedroom, and the prayers after a lover leaves–and so this ritual act of language, this prayer for the lover to remain, is even more powerful. This song has less cursing, less anger, and perhaps less holiness than the other tracks (including the banshee keen and silky whisper of “V.I.P.”) but the humanity of it – the domestic puzzling out of small details, and the tenderness of devotion – seems to be neither an easter place nor a lenten place. Maybe she has finally moved away from the Church and maybe the wolf getting married is like Brigid being given back to Ireland?
[10]
Josh Langhoff: When I hear O’Connor’s lyrical and musical simplicity on this song and its fine parent album, I think of chairs. Specifically John Lennon’s blues-song-as-chair: “It’s not a concept, it’s a chair; not a design for the chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated.” Specifically Lou Reed-via-Lester Bangs’s “‘I walked to the chair / Then I sat in it’ school of lyrics.” Leaving aside the question of why chairs were the go-to useful objects — maybe because, unlike doors, they hadn’t been co-opted as a notable band name — this song reveals Lennon’s metaphor as problematic primitivist bullshit. My grandpa makes beautiful cane chairs, and you bet they’re meant for appreciation along with sitting. Why else would he sand and stain them perfectly and carve little hearts in the back? So it was with “John the Revelator” and “Manish Boy”, with Plastic Ono Band and Coney Island Baby, and so it is with “Wolf.” I mean, “he’ll never cry again”, “your smile makes me smile” — there’s nothing to it! But notice how O’Connor and producer John Reynolds have overdubbed the different timbres her voice at least four different ways, each way with its own purpose. The guitars, bass, and kick drum establish a syncopated composite rhythm that the melody will dance around throughout the song. And even the scan-defying bridge, with its rhyme of “SOMEthing”, “HAPP’ning”, “THE thing”, and “YOU most” upsets expectations in a way that must mirror its subject when he’s puttering around the house, acting all Wolfy and making Sinéad laugh. Craft follows pleasure and vice versa.
[7]
Brad Shoup: The first O’Connor output I heard after Am I Not Your Girl? was 2000’s “No Man’s Woman”. An astounding mixture of emancipation and worship, it sounded like the herald for a remarkable pop/rock priesthood, but the acolytes were few in coming. In the years since, O’Connor’s penchant for autobiography (or “confession”, if you see me in a Sex Revolts book club) has recently led to her making a few personal announcements of varying endearment. “The wolf is getting married” sounds, as a phrase, then, only half-metaphorical. (The image has precedent in her work: 1994’s Universal Mother had “My Darling Child,” a lullabye sung to “me little wolf”.) The track chimes and sparkles like vintage U2, with guitar after guitar sent into the fray for a little melodic illumination. Instead of “Woman”‘s snare raps, we have long-rumbling bass and kickdrum over the horizon. The text gets treacly, sure, but love means never worrying to say things well. Even her pronunciation of “terrible” in the countermelody doesn’t irk me. Even though the relationship she’s singing of has ended, here she sounds as sure of this joy as she once did of the Spirit’s love, and her shouts have lost no force.
[8]
Iain Mew: Competent M.O.R. jangle, completely transformed by the gripping way in which Sinéad sings it. She fills every single word with emotion and constantly threatens to burst out of the song’s confines, not least with the long run on line of “even when something terrible is happening you laugh and that’s the thing I love about you most”, as ominous as it is joyous. My enjoyment of the song is further boosted by an unintentional association: I’m hoping that Alex is going to save me from being the only one who can’t hear “The Wolf is getting married and he’ll never cry again” without thinking of Patrick.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: If ever a track needed its context, it’s this. Sinéad spent the past few months lonely, miserable and – the part that does not do – sharing it, or oversharing. The tabloids did their usual worst, so gleeful to see her so undone. Fans and gawkers solicited acts they couldn’t quite believe she was offering. Eventually it led to a breakdown, then as close to a recovery as plausible; eventually one man sufficed, if only briefly. In a year often unkind to its female musicians, these events were among the cruelest and most terrifying: a reminder that you could achieve all that’s achievable, make music history, become a legend, but still wind up alone with your self-loathing, unfulfilled and diminished. “The Wolf Is Getting Married” can’t help but be about that. In the video, the chorus swoons forth just as the camera pans back to reveal Sinéad engulfed, face and body, in lace, like a bug in a web or a corpse in a shroud. I gasped; the image betrays such shame. But there’s no shame at all in the music, a love song as earnestly vulnerable as Scarlet in the ’90s: “Your laugh makes me laugh. Your joy gives me joy. The wolf is getting married, and he’ll never cry again.” These are feelings that get you hurt. They’re not wise, but neither are they avoidable. Toward the end of the song, the lace half-melts away, and Sinéad becomes human again.
[10]
Alfred Soto: A poor choice for a single, not with “Reason With Me” and “Old Vine” on hand. Never mind that it’s a pallid retread of 2000’s “No Man’s Woman” – it’s also plodding and hookless, although I admire the way her voice looks for emotions in bars and chords without settling on a key or even melody. One of the year’s best albums deserves better.
[4]
John Seroff: “The Wolf” sounds more or less like what late eighties me would’ve imagined future O’Connor to sound like: somewhat mellowed, reasonably virtuosic, tangy and adult contemporary-ready.
[6]
Jer Fairall: She sounds as comfortable here as that perpetually agitated voice is capable of, and the music is measured, tuneful, and tasteful. Yet despite the sweetness of this lyric (though “I was too free/if that’s possible to be” is fraught with typically Sinead-ian tension), she never seems more invested here than when she’s attaching a hint of bile to “And the sun’s peeping out of the sky / where it used to be only grey,” like there’s something she misses about the sensation of greyness as much as she kinda-sorta mourns her former excess of freedom. What I’m saying is that I’m happy that she is happy, but is she?
[6]