Sinead O'Connor joined Tom on Thursday evening to discuss her new album, 'I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss'. 

The album received enormous critical acclaim from Tom Dunne in the weeks preceding the interview. 

O'Connor feels that character plays a crucial role in her current songwriting process. She described the experience of being sent film scripts in the post which she had been asked to write songs for. Reading the characters on the page helped inform her approach to songwriting. 

"There were about three or four songs on the last record that were written from the point of view of the character...that has very much moved on to this record where there would be two or three songs that are personal and the rest would be characters and that’s something that I really enjoy now," she explained. 

One of the key songs on the new album is '8 Good Reasons' which deals with the theme of suicide. 

"It’s a tricky subject matter to write a song about...you don’t want to put a song on the radio that isn't going to have anything other than a positive conclusion so I was very conscious about putting hope into it," she said. 

'I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss' is released on August 11th.