New Dreams
Four years after the Cranberries, Dolores O'Riordan wants to know if you'll listen.
; "LET IT LINGER: O'Riordan and her band work some Cranberries songs into their live shows.")
LET IT LINGER: O'Riordan and her band work some Cranberries songs into their live shows. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
Breaking up is hard to do. Just ask Dolores O'Riordan, who filled the first two Cranberries albums with the dregs of a soured relationship. Even after she got married in 1994, her abandonment issues occasionally crept into songs.
Her band didn't fade out gracefully, either. After five records, The Cranberries split in 2003 amid an abbreviated tour, aborted studio sessions, a public feud with their label and the four members' adventures in parenthood. O'Riordan herself disappeared from the business she'd been in her whole adult life.
"It was important for me to kind of ground and get away from the entertainment industry. No Web site or no connection at all with that world," she says. "I just really kind of switched off. And I just wanted to find out who I was if I wasn't a singer."
She dedicated herself to being a full-time mother of four. When she felt moved to compose, she'd wait until the kids were in bed. "It became a hobby, really," she says. Having been on the write-record-tour treadmill since she was in her late teens, O'Riordan took pleasure in making music when she felt like it, rather than when she was obligated to deliver an album. Two days here, two days there — eventually she had more than a dozen tunes.
Four years in the making, Are You Listening? puts her back on the treadmill. She's in Milan, where she's making a TV appearance the night after a show in Cologne, and tomorrow she's got a gig in London. It may be hard work, but from a distance it looks more glamorous than feeding the kids and ironing their clothes.
She's not complaining, though — about any of it. In fact, on the phone and on the new album, she sounds more comfortable and more confident on her own than she did fronting a multiplatinum group. Because when you're the boss, you don't have to coordinate schedules with your bandmates. You tell your hired guns when to show up, and they do what they're told.
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Funny that one of The Cranberries' first hits, "Dreams," was about love and devotion, considering that Dolores O'Riordan spent the rest of the band's debut fighting with her man, threatening to leave him, or wondering why he'd abandoned her. Fourteen years later, she's repeated the trick. While "Ordinary Day," the jangling lead single from her first solo album, is a lovely ode to her little girl, most of Are You Listening? traffics in pain: "Stay with Me" was inspired by her father's illness, "Apple of My Eye" by her husband's hospitalization and "Black Widow" by her mother-in-law's death. As always, O'Riordan's full of fear and loathing, but instead of castigating her lover and herself, she saves her ire for child molesters and music industry leeches. She's not a great lyricist yet; still, after The Cranberries' simplistic takes on Bosnia and 9/11, it's nice to see her back to writing what she knows.
—M.J.F.
O'Riordan and producer Dan Brodbeck conceived much of Are You Listening? in her basement. "Did a lot of it on ProTools in my houses, you know, all the creative process," she says. "And then when I'd have all the ideas and the song kind of done on ProTools, I'd fly in my musicians and they'd put down four or five in two days."
The guys who play on the album are in her touring band, and they have some tough pedigrees. Bassist Marco Mendoza's been with Ted Nugent, Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy; Graham Hopkins of Therapy? plays drums; and guitarist Steve DeMarchi paid his dues with power balladeers Sheriff and Alias. (DeMarchi's brother Denny, who plays keyboards, completes the group.) Naturally, Are You Listening? gets hard and slick quick.
"At first I thought it was going to be very mellow and piano-based, because 'The Apple of My Eye' was the first song that I recorded," O'Riordan says. "And then I just started going through different experiences, like, you know, ups and downs and challenges and people being sick and my various moods. And then the songs just started to get more edgy."
The group adds also muscle to her old hits. "We do the big songs, like 'Linger' and 'Dreams.' ... It's quite nice 'cause it brings back a lot of memories and stuff." And her kids take to them, too — even the ones too young to understand what she does for a living. "They like The Cranberries stuff," O'Riordan says. "I think they like anything Mommy sings, and more so because I'm Mommy, obviously. I'm Mom first, always."
She's on good terms with her former bandmates, she says, and doesn't rule out a reunion somewhere down the line. But for now, O'Riordan likes where she's at and she doesn't intend to return to the big social issues that bogged down The Cranberries once she'd worked through her relationship woes.
No promises, though. "You don't really know what you're gonna be like in five years' time," she says. "And you don't really know what the world's gonna be like in five years' time."
Fri., July 13, 8 p.m., $35, with Jessie Baylin, Fillmore at the TLA, 334 South St., 215-922-1011, www.livenation.com.
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