Sinéad O’Connor left her children instructions in the event of her death, including calling her accountant before 911: ‘When artists are dead, they’re much more valuable’

• Sinéad O'Connor left her children instructions in the event of her death.
• They included calling her accountant before 911.

Sinéad O'Connor left her children instructions in the event of her death, including calling her accountant before 911.

The Irish singer, most famous for her 1990 rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U," died earlier this week aged 56.

In an interview with People in 2021, O'Connor said that she had stressed to her children how important it was to protect both her art and her money if she died.

"When the artists are dead, they're much more valuable than when they're alive," O'Connor said, citing the fact that rapper 2Pac had "released way more albums" after he died in 1996 than when he was alive.

"It's kind of gross what record companies do," she continued. "That's why I've always instructed my children since they were very small, 'If your mother drops dead tomorrow, before you called 911, call my accountant and make sure the record companies don't start releasing my records and not telling you where the money is.'"

O'Connor is survived by three of her four children, Jake, Roisin, and Yeshua. Her son Shane died by suicide in 2022.

In the People interview, O'Connor shared her disgust at how she felt record companies had treated Prince after his death in 2016 — despite the two singers not having a good personal relationship.

"One of the things that's a great bugbear with me, I get very angry when I think of it, is the fact that they're raping his vault," she told People.

According to Rolling Stone, Prince had thousands of unreleased records and demos kept in his vault at the time of his death. A number of those projects, most recently 2021's "Welcome 2 America," have since been released by Prince's estate.

"All musicians, we have songs that we really are embarrassed about that are crap," O'Connor told People. "We don't want anyone hearing them. Now this is a man who released every song he ever recorded, so if he went to the trouble of building a vault, which is a pretty strong thing to do, that means he really did not want these songs released. And I can't stand that people are, as I put it, raping the vault."

The Dublin-born singer added that she believed Prince would have hated hearing his 1984 hit "Let's Go Crazy" in a commercial.

"That's a song about appreciation, friendship, and love and not the material things in life. It's a song about, 'Look, we could die anytime now. Let's love each other and appreciate,'" she said. "I think he will be turning in his grave over it being used to sell a credit card."