Troy

Sinéad O'Connor wrote "Troy", her debut single, released on October 19, 1987 on Chrysalis with "Still Listening" on the B-side, 6:34, produced with Kevin Moloney and recorded in 1986 at Oasis Studios in London (the album page says 1986 to 1987). The title and imagery come from W. B. Yeats's poem "No Second Troy", and the National Library of Ireland holds an audio recording of her reading it. Songfacts reports it has strings unlike the rest of the album and that she said it has only two chords, while Paste's Cynthia Joyce says three. Joyce also notes that at over six minutes it was never played on commercial radio, and quotes O'Connor in the documentary: it's not a song, it's a testament.

As a single it reached 5 on the Dutch Top 40 in 1988 and 12 in Flanders, and was not a hit in Ireland or the UK. A 2002 dance version, "Troy (The Phoenix from the Flame)", reached 48 in the UK and 3 on the US dance club chart. The video, directed by John Maybury, was shot at the Hell Fire Club on Montpelier Hill south of Dublin, with her bald in gold and silver body paint before flames. AllMusic's Erlewine heard a hushed, quiet intensity, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson an epic and visceral psychodrama, and Slant's Cinquemani perhaps the album's defining moment.

Setlist.fm lists it in 54 setlists, and Wikipedia says she performed it live in the year after release and then until 2008, last noted at Night of the Proms. A solo performance at Pinkpop in the Netherlands in 1988 circulates on video, in front of a crowd Paste puts at 60,000. The Year of the Horse concert film, recorded in Brussels and Rotterdam in October 1990, ends with it. L'Espiral and Zoe Bleu covered it in 2024. We cannot say which of these our upload is.