Songfacts®:

• This a cappella song deals with Sinéad O'Connor's mother, who died in 1985. O'Connor claims that her mother abused her, but after her death she struggled to reconcile her feelings for her mom, which often found their way into Sinéad's songs. In her memoir Rememberings, she explained how the song came together.
  
  "I went to see a medium and my mother came through," she wrote. "My mother asked my sister to forgive her for what she had done to all of us. But my sister would not forgive her. And while I understood this, it made me very, very sad for my mother's soul. I was so young and didn't know any better. That night I had a dream in which my mother came to me for the first time since she had died a year and a half earlier. In the dream, I told my mother I was sorry that Eimear couldn't forgive her. My mother said, 'I do not want what I haven't got.' What my mother meant was that she didn't deserve my sister's forgiveness and that she knew she didn't deserve it so that I shouldn't feel sorry for her."
• This is the last song and title track to Sinéad O'Connor's second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. That title is a good representation of Sinéad's ethos; the album made her very famous thanks to the hit "Nothing Compares 2 U," but she found that fame stifling and pushed back against it. All she really wanted was the autonomy to make music on her terms and the financial security to raise her family (she had her first child in 1987). The adulation, scrutiny and pressure that were the byproduct of her success she rejected spectacularly, culminating when she tore up a photo of the Pope (one that belonged to her mother) on Saturday Night Live.