Dolores O’Riordan: The Simple Things That Make Life Extraordinary

When CONFRONT’s Editor told me that we were being offered an interview with Dolores O’Riordan, I jumped at the opportunity. Here was my chance to finally interview someone whose music I had been listening to for years, having been a fan of the Cranberries since the very early 1990s when I bought ‘Everybody Else is Doing it, so Why Can’t We?’; CONFRONT’s interview coincided with the release of ‘Are You Listening?’, O’Riordan’s first solo effort.

My excitement turned to worry, however, because while doing research on O’Riordan, I discovered that the singer/songwriter from Limerick, Ireland is a fairly private person; what little news there is of her is fairly ordinary, and as straightforward as she and the Cranberries had been about their politics through their music, there wasn’t much controversy to build an interview around.

Fortunately what I found out while talking with the unassuming artist who was calling from Cologne, Germany, was just how easily she inspired conversation.  So much so in fact, that I found myself speaking with her as if we were old friends catching up, talking about things like children, creativity, our mutual love-hate relationship with road-trip vacations and just the simple things that make life so extraordinary.

Despite having jotted down questions about the release of ‘Are You Listening?’ I found myself engrossed in conversations about her family life, getting a glimpse into how this Irish mother juggles celebrity and family.  Although originally intended as a Beat Bazaar interview, Dolores’s candid simplicity with regard to herself and motherhood made it impossible to not want to share this side of her in greater detail.

“Well, in part I just really wanted to spend some seriously quality time with my family,” she explained when I mentioned that it had been 4 years between this new solo project and the last release of the Cranberries. “I’d finished with the Cranberries; we’d kind of done the full journey: five albums, the Greatest Hits…we were out of the contract and it was time to get off of the treadmill and get away from it all, go chill out and enjoy the kiddies-and have another one!”

I had noticed that one item of criticism that kept coming up in reviews I had read was that ‘Are you Listening?’ sounds so much like the Cranberries musically.  Was it her intention to continue in the same musical style or was that just coincidental? After all, O’Riordan’s voice is expressly distinctive.

“Well, I didn’t really want to cut my legs off and call myself “Shorty” or anything like that.  It’s still me, so it’s the same chick, the same writer.  I’m a little bit more experimental though.”