a phrase. In short, O'Connor wasn't afraid of mixing her impulses. Every time she stared into a camera or at an audience – with her big, doleful eyes and sexy-scary shaved head – she looked defiant and vulnerable, full of both hunger and fear for all that life might hold for her.

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is less about O'Connor's ambitions than the cost of those ambitions, and in almost every regard, it is an even better record than her first. The album seems the work of a transformed woman – someone who has put aside much of the anger and confusion that fueled her earlier songs and has found a hard-earned measure of spiritual happiness. It opens with a prayer for strength and wisdom and closes with another, offering a brave, fearful thanks for equanimity. Yet it is what comes between those prayers – a journey through rage and heartbreak to grace – that ultimately makes this record so memorable and so powerful.

Indeed, if I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is a work about spirit, it is a spirit that is fierce and caustic. "I should have hatred for you/But I do not have any.... And you have taught me plenty," O'Connor sings toward the end of the album's opening track, "Feel So Different." In that moment, it is impossible to tell whether she is confronting a distant god or a failed lover – or both.

In any event, the memory of a hard loss burns at the heart of this album. Somebody, it seems – apparently a mentor as much as a lover – has shattered the singer's trust, and the fallout from that ordeal spills into nearly every song. It feels as if there is no distance between the life the singer has lived this last year or so and the one she is singing about. O'Connor has created not only an unflinching portrait of broken romance but also a glimpse into the personal costs of sudden success and how an artist's public persona can be turned against her in private moments.

"I never said I was tough/That was everyone else," she sings in "You Cause As Much Sorrow," in a voice that sounds both wounded and indignant. "So you're a fool to attack me/For the image that you built yourself." Elsewhere, in "The Emperor's New Clothes," the memories turn angry, and so does the music. "He thinks I just became famous/And that's what messed me up," O'Connor snarls. "But he's wrong/How could I possibly know what I want/When I was only twenty-one