In an interview by Calgary Sun Dolores was asked about her life in Canada, her inspirations for “Are you listening?” and the possibility of a The Cranberries reunion. Read it here:
Canada, specifically Northern Ontario, figures prominently in Are You Listening?, the first-ever solo record from Cranberries’ frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan.
In stores tomorrow, the 12-track album was largely written and demoed in O’Riordan’s longtime second home outside Peterborough that she shares with Candian-born husband Don Burton and their three young children. (She also has a 15-year-old stepson who lives in Toronto full-time.)
“It’s so inspiring up there,” said the Irish-born O’Riordan, 35, down the line from her other home in Dublin recently.
“It’s so peaceful that you really get kind of grounded, and you kind of forget about everything — you just become (a) human being, which is lovely.
“When you’re just in the silence of the forest it’s very inspiring, all the seasons,” she continued. “And I kind of used the seasons as a backdrop, really, to create the music and then I would put the lyrics to the music. So it was great, you know.
“There’s nothing as beautiful as the peace up north. It’s unique, the whole lifestyle, you know. I have a great romance with Canada. Any of the songs I wrote here in Ireland, I wrote them kind of by the seaside. So I’m very lucky to have the best of both worlds.”
O’Riordan, who went through a nervous breakdown and dramatic weight loss at the height of the Cranberries’ success about a decade ago, also had a lot of fodder as a solo songwriter.
She was dealing with the cancer death of her beloved mother-in-law Denise Burton (as documented in the new song Black Widow), and then the birth of her third child, Dakota, who is now 2 (celebrated on the new tune Ordinary Day).
BABY CHANGED THINGS
“She passed away, so we went through that stuff, but then when we had that new baby, it kind of turned everything around fast, you know,” said O’Riordan, whose North American tour launches July 6 in Montreal before stopping in Toronto on July 7 and Vancouver on July 23.
“(Black Widow) was kind of just about watching the whole demise, ’cause I’ve never seen that happen before and I guess it kind of opens up your eyes to how fragile life is.”
In addition, O’Riordan was processing the reality of the Cranberries, who formed in 1990 and last released an album in 2001, going on hiatus.
“We never said that it was forever,” explained O’Riordan. “Just that our personal lives kind of took over and it seemed kind of like the right thing to do, to kind of take a break. During that break I was enjoying it so much that it became a longer break and a longer break and so it became four years and I was just writing away on my time off myself, so I decided to kind of do the solo record then. It’s kind of been an experiment, I suppose.”
O’Riordan insists her Cranberries bandmates are “very cool” with her solo outing and that “we could do a reunion tour at some point in the future.”
Ultimately, Are You Listening?, which mines similar-sounding musical territory as The Cranberries, gave O’Riordan a sense of liberation, working at her own pace and on her own schedule.
“It’s really great, actually. I suppose it’s a turning point,” O’Riordan summed up.
Posted in Stuff, Interviews with Dolores |