By MARK DANIELL — For JAM! Music
“Stop it,” Cranberries frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan chides. “Is it that gorgeous there? You’re making me jealous now. We could be in the boat out on the lake.”
Calling from Dublin late one April evening, the lithe singer-songwriter retreats downstairs eager to hear news about Toronto, her home-away-from-home. “You know, my husband’s from there,” she says giddily. “We moved over to Canada for a bit, lock, stock and barrel. The kids went to school there and everything.”
In between packing for a trip to Hong Kong to promote her first solo album - “Are You Listening?” - since the Cranberries went on an indefinite hiatus a few years back, O’Riordan says it was her solitary walks near her northern Ontario cottage that got her creative juices flowing again.
“I was kind of writing as a hobby, it’d gone back to being a hobby for me, and I found I got a lot of material done up there in Ontario in the middle of the forest,” she says.
After auditioning and winning the lead vocalist gig with the Cranberries in 1990, O’Riordan, 35, was the voice behind some of Ireland’s most memorable songs during the ’90s. While U2 flirted with electronica, and Sinead O’Connor watched her career get eclipsed by her erratic personal life, the Limerick, Ireland, quartet etched out a spot for themselves on alternative radio dials across the continent with their alternating mix of slow-motion pop (”Linger”) and explosive rock (”Zombie”).
Sporting a spunky new hairdo with each new release following 1993’s wildly popular, “Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?” the band went from playing tiny clubs to packing Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre in a few short years. But following 2001’s “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” the group went their separate ways to pursue solo projects.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/Artists/O/ORiordan_Dolores/2007/05/10/4169317-ca.html