Watch Sharon Van Etten Cover The Hell Out Of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys On Mopeds”

Watch Sharon Van Etten Cover The Hell Out Of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys On Mopeds”

Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys On Mopeds” is one of those songs that only becomes more topical and more powerful with every passing year. The song comes from O’Connor’s 1989 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, and she wrote it about the 1983 Colin Roach, a 21-year-old black Londoner whose death, ruled a suicide at the time, sure looked like a case of police covering up a murder. But O’Connor’s lyrics — “These are dangerous days / To say what you feel is to dig your own grave / Remember what I told you / If they were of the world, they would love you” — apply to a whole lot more than London in the ’80s.

In a world where police brutality and racial violence won’t go away, a song like “Black Boys On Mopeds” will always be relevant. EMA covered the song three years ago, and now Sharon Van Etten, who released the excellent album Remind Me Tomorrow a few months ago, has been covering the song live on her recent tour. And now Van Etten has played it in a SiriusXM session. Her solo-acoustic take on it is a real gut-ripper.

There aren’t too many singers who can step to Sinéad O’Connor, but Sharon Van Etten is one of them. Etten’s solo-acoustic arrangement of “Black Boys On Mopeds” is pretty faithful to the original. Her voice is completely different, but she puts all her husky intensity into the song. It’s a heavy, emotional song, and she doesn’t shy away from that, giving it all the stomach-punch intensity that the song demands. Check out a video below.

Remind Me Tomorrow is out now on Jagjaguwar.

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