Dolores O’Riordan

Source: InsideOnline
Year: march, 2007
Author: Gord McLaughlin.

Summon up a mental image of Dolores O’Riordan and chances are you’re seeing red. She sported various shades if scarlet when she was lead singer of The Cranberries”, the Irish alt-rock band that sold more then 36million albums before going on hiatus four years ago. She once even shaved her head, a la Sinead O’Connor. But with the release of her first solo CD, Are You Listening?, Dolores reveals that neither her hair not her music remains the colour of cranberries.

First the hair. “It’s au naturel, mon cheri”, laughs O’Riordan during a telephone interview. “Long black hair like when I was a little girl, really. It’s so natural and easy and sensible.” The plain-speaking Irish woman recoils when asked fro post-baldness grooming tips for Britney Spears. “I just think it’s none of my business. I think if anything she needs privacy.”

O’Riordan can relate. When The Cranberries wound down, she says she left a duge urge to disappear o’ the face of the Earth. It helped to have a Canadian husband, Don Burton (the tour manager for Duran Duran), whom she wed in 1994. Eir riral Ontario home o’ered the seclusion she needed to make a creative turn. “Going out into the snow and the forest, you’re kind of really at the ends of the Earth. I’ve seen bears so many times in the last few years.

O’Riordan says cutting herself o’ from public life was vital to writing fresh songs. “You have to feel you’re not marketing yourself in any way.” Departing from a rock format brought” a huge amount of freedom. You’re not sitting in a room with bass, guitar and drums. I would begin on piano. It’s a completely different form to be writing in. I have access to a lot more chords. I could create nice owing melody lines that are hooky, that kind of work their way in.”

! e piano presence definitely marks a departure for O’Riordan, particularly in cuts like “When We Were Young”. Staccato keystrokes jab like a sewing machine against her velvet voice in the stark plaintive opening: “Funny how things just tasted better when we were young.” Yet the same song moves in and out of a relentless guitar-driven rock aria. O’Riordan’s lyrics are as direct and evo-cative as ever, suggesting that life is both the greatest blessing and a hell of trial.

It was in the couple’s Irish home that O’Riordan worked out the alternately haunting and harrowing piano lines on the song “Black Widow”, a reaction to her mother-in-law’s death from cancer. “I’d never really encountered people going through it before,” says O’Riordan, who has likened the disease to a beast attacking from within. “When you see what it does to human beings, you realize that it’s actually evil.” ! ere’s a dunnier inspiration behind the CD’s first single. “Ordinary Day”, a lush and upbeat reflection on childhood. “I’m kind of talking to my girls and telling them what I think though my own experience,” she says. “It’s like talking to my own self. You see your girls, and it’s like seeing yourself.” O’Riordan also has a son, born in Toronto in 1997. She gures all three children have been shaped in part by mama’s music, starting in the womb.

“I remember one gig I was eight months pregnant with my second kid, and every time the bass and drums would kick in for rock songs, the baby would start kicking and dancing,” says O’Riordan, whose own musical gestation is far from ever. When she was fronting! “Cranberries, she liked to record her vocal tracks in the dark because it helped her to let loose. “I thing when I first started singing, I was quite shy,” she explains. O’Riordan was barely our of her teens when she joined the band in the early ’90’s. “Over the years I’ve become more aggressive with the singing out, more experimental with melody,” she says. “And I tend to work a lot with rhythm in my voice.” Now, at 35, O’Riordan is happy to record with the lights on, with a little urging from Youth, the groundbreaking producer (U2, The Verve) who worked on “Ordinary Day” and “Apple of My Eye”.

“He really liked to be able to see me. He likes to be able to stand up in the control room and dance a lot. If someone wants to see you and feed o’ you. I have no problem with that.”