Songfacts®:

• Many of Sinéad O'Connor's songs deal with her life, but "Jackie" is a story she made up about ghost doomed to spend eternity looking for her husband. She explained in her memoir Rememberings: "I had seen a play on TV about a very old lady in Scotland who was coming toward her own death. She would spend her days looking through her curtained window, waiting to see her long-gone husband return from a fishing trip he'd taken 40 years earlier and during which he'd drowned. They had been childless, and she never met anyone else. This inspired me, somehow, to write 'Jackie,' about a character who is wandering the beach waiting for the return of someone dead. In my song, the narrator is a ghost."
• "Jackie" is the first track on Sinéad O'Connor's debut album, The Lion And The Cobra. She wrote the song when she was about 15, got her record deal at 18, and issued the album at 20.
• O'Connor had already shaved her head by the time The Lion And The Cobra was released, so she's bald on the cover. In the international version, she has her mouth open in a scream, but in the American release she's looking down and demure. This was because her record label (Ensign, based in England) didn't want her to appear angry in the American market. Sinéad liked the international cover much better.