Songfacts®:

• O'Connor wrote "Drink Before The War" about the headmaster at An Grianán, the Catholic reform school in Waterford, Ireland she attended. As you can suss from the song, she didn't think very highly of this guy. In her book Rememberings, she calls him "a snob and a cowardly little f--ker."
  
  "He hated me making music and campaigned for my father not to let me take my guitar with me back to boarding school, despite the fact that all I could do was make music," she explained. "I used to smoke right outside his gate to try to get expelled as a protest against his protest against my music-making. It never worked."
• "Drink Before The War" is part of Sinéad O'Connor's debut album, The Lion And The Cobra, released in 1987 when she was 20 years old. She wrote the song a few years earlier and first recorded it at a 1985 demo session Ensign Records commissioned to see if they wanted to sign her. The label was impressed and offered her a deal. When it came time to record The Lion And The Cobra, three songs from the demo made the cut: "Drink Before The War," "Just Like U Said It Would B," and "Never Get Old."
  
  O'Connor was pregnant with her first child during most of the sessions; the father is John Reynolds, her drummer. He was also her first husband; they were married from 1987 to 1991. O'Connor had three more children and three more marriages, none of which were to the fathers.
• The title sounds like a line from a poem or a bit of movie dialogue, but O'Connor made it up. She says she has no idea where it came from.
• After releasing the album, O'Connor toured as the opening act for INXS as her star began to rise. She quickly learned that she had no interest in becoming famous, but that's what happened when she released her next album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, in 1990. The single "Nothing Compares 2 U" was a global smash, and the idiosyncratic became the toast of the town. She rebelled by tearing up a photo of the Pope in a 1992 Saturday Night Live performance, which knocked her off the A-list.
• In the 2022 episode "You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can" of the HBO series Euphoria, the character Cal, a troubled soul, plays this song on a jukebox as he's having a breakdown. The song also appears in the 1990 movie State Of Grace.
• The first attempts at recording the album The Lion And The Cobra were with producer Mick Glossop, known for his work with Van Morrison and The Waterboys. Those sessions didn't go well, and he was replaced by the album's engineer, Kevin Moloney. With Moloney at the helm, the songs changed direction.
  
  "The first with Glossop was a very organic, band-driven, traditional sounding ballad," Robert Dean, who played guitar on the album, told Songfacts. "We had rehearsed and fine-tuned it for many months. It most certainly had its attributes but was probably too conventional for the audience the record company wanted to attract. It is indeed a simple and beautiful song, and was nonetheless well represented on the finished record."