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Author: BERNARD PERUSSE, The Gazette
Published: July 06, 2007
After years spent feeling like a commodity instead of a human, ex-Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan is enjoying her life
When you take four years to record an album, people will think you’re either lazy or Paul Simon. But the wait for Dolores O’Riordan’s new disc, Are You Listening? - her first since the demise of the Cranberries - had nothing to do with lethargy or obsessive perfectionism.
“I wanted to take time out to enjoy my life and not be rushing around in the rat race, which I felt I had been in the Cranberries,” she explained during a recent telephone interview. While the group was together, she said, time seemed to be going too quickly. “Each time I’d have a baby, I’d go back on tour when the baby was (about) 5 months old,” she said. “This time, it was nice not to be in a contract and not feel like you had to be an entertainer. For once in my life, that was my feeling - just to feel like a human spirit.”
For O’Riordan, the leisurely pace was a long time coming. She was only 23 when the Cranberries broke through commercially in 1994 with their second album, the multi-platinum seller No Need to Argue. The Irish group’s hard-edged pop sound, largely defined by O’Riordan’s go-for-the-jugular vocal attack, brought arena-rock success. For a while, during the mid-’90s, it seemed as if songs like Linger, Zombie and Salvation were part of the zeitgeist.
Fame came at too high a price for O’Riordan. “There’s not really much I remember (about those years), except working all the time, and a lot of suitcases being packed and unpacked, singing 24/7 and seeing millions of hotels. It was just a big fog, really,” she said. “If you’re very big, there’s a lot of demand, and you’re wanted in 50 places at once. There’s massive pressure on you. It’s inevitable that you’re going to get burned out when you’re young.”
The singer began to fight depression. “I was a workaholic and I was driven too hard by the industry,” she said. “Because I had no life, I got depressed. I was really thin, and I had a skinhead - and I didn’t look happy.”
The Cranberries followed up their breakthrough album with To the Faithful Departed (1996). By the time O’Riordan left and the group officially broke up in 2004, they had released five studio albums.
While hope springs eternal for some diehard fans, O’Riordan said the Cranberries are finished. “We could do a reunion tour in 15 years’ time or something,” she said. “We did what we’d set out to do.”
O’Riordan, who married Don Burton, Duran Duran’s former tour manager, in 1994, said her children - stepson Donny, 16; Taylor, 10; Molly, 6; and Dakota, 2 - have provided a durable anchor.
“When you’re a kid and you have nothing and you go out there and you’re famous and everybody wants to kiss your bum-bum morning,
That emotional connection informs much of the material on Are You Listening?, she acknowledged - but the idea that domestic joy is a deterrent to art is a cliche, she said.
She’s glad she had children at a young age, she said. “I’m 35 now. There’s a sense of reality you get from children that you don’t get from being famous.”
Her close bond with her mother is echoed in the kind of relationship she fosters with her own kids, she said. “I think the mother-daughter bond is a very particular one. Your mother lived her life and she wants you to fulfill all your dreams and maybe the ones she didn’t fulfill. I feel that with my own kids. When they accomplish something, I see it as my own accomplishment.”
Some of the youngsters may join O’Riordan on parts of her current tour, which began in May. “We’re having great fun,” she said of her new backing musicians. “Working with new people, it’s totally like being in a new group. We’re having a good laugh.”
Dolores O’Riordan performs at Metropolis,