's infamous Saturday Night Live incident, when she tore a photo of the Pope.

She's even been yesterday's news, retreating from the spotlight after suffering emotional breakdown.

Now, returning a little wiser but no less outspoken with the Gospel Oak EP, her first release in three years, she would just like to be Sinead O'Connor, singer.

"I just want a nice career and know I can make a living," says the 31-year-old mother of two, who plays Massey Hall tonight. "I still `don't want what I have not got,' I guess."

The gentle Gospel Oak captures the sound of the Irish singer making peace with herself and reclaiming her voice.

O'Connor - who took vocal training at Dublin's Parnell School of Music during her hiatus from record-making - also breaks logical new ground for herself with the album's spare marriage of traditional Celtic music, gospel and pop. Gone is the banshee wail heard on The Lion And The Cobra.

"My teacher was a genius," O'Connor says of her singing lessons. "He gave me my voice, basically, just by teaching me how to sing in my own accent, in a way that was not going to damage my voice. I couldn't keep doing what I was doing on my first record. I would have had a very short career if I'd kept that up."

O'Connor has no plans to revisit her early work - written when she was still a teen - any time soon.

"I love that first record but I'm not ready to go back and look at all that yet," she says. "My work is very much like diaries and I don't want to drag that up again, it's too painful. I'm in such a good place now and I've gone through so much to get here."

She makes no apologies for the rocky road she took.

"My work is very much about defying shame," says O'Connor, who's always been candid about her abuse as a child at the hands of her mother. "My upbringing was extremely shaming, and my whole process as a singer is to stand up and not be ashamed. You're licked if you let shame get you. Then the abuser has won."

Gospel Oak is not without its political statements: This Is A Rebel Song starts as a plaintive love song and unfolds into a comment on the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

"The song rebels against a fear which exists in Ireland of anyone standing up and saying that we have the right to ownership of our own country," O'Connor says. "People are afraid it would mean we believe in murder. The silence is palpable. There's a pink elephant in the middle of O'Connell street and everyone is pretending it's not there.

"But what goes on in private is what's responsible for what goes on in public. This Is A Rebel Song really was about a man before it was political.

"Songs can't save the world," she adds. "They can cut through and provide healing where people can't. They can put their arms around you and tell you you're not alone."

Which makes Gospel Oak all the more important to O'Connor. The record spent several months in limbo after Chrysalis went bankrupt in June. It's since been picked up by Columbia for a fall re-release.

"I was extremely worried that my record might be lost. I put up a tooth-and-nail fight to make sure it wasn't.

"They say you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Well, I broke a lot of eggs. But I got a f---ing good omlette."