TIME permitting, flower arranging, a spot of golf, or even some
light needlework might sound like normal interests for a devoted wife
and mother of four beautiful children, but then Dolores O'Riordan is
not your average workaday housewife.
The Ballybricken lass best known as mouthpiece for dormant Irish
rock band, The Cranberries, is currently swept up in a media whirlwind
to promote her forthcoming album, 'No Baggage'.
With Dolores's second solo record due for release this August and a tour lined up that will see her rock her tiny little socks off in concert venues all over the world; I think it's fair to say that her 'hobby' is a bit more time-consuming than most!
“It's a good laugh. I don't really sweat the small stuff anymore. I used to do that when I was young but now music is just a hobby. It's just something that I do because I love it,” Dolores O'Riordan tells the Limerick Independent's Alan Jacques in an interview for his Green and Live rock show on Live 95FM.
“I suppose for such a long time it became a job and became my life and all that over the top kind of thing, but now it's totally a hobby and something to have fun with.
I suppose the experiences I had in my life have made me realise that it isn't always about the music.
It's about where the music come from. And of course it comes from love, it comes from relationships, it comes from having a life outside a band and being on tour all the time,” O'Riordan explains.
Co-produced by Ontario-based Dan Brodbeck, 'No Baggage', sees the millionaire Limerick singer explore many emotive subjects.
The media machine is already talking up Dolores's sophomore solo record as her most confessional and emotional since 1994's 'No Need To Argue'.
Looking forward and backwards is one of the new album's primary themes.
“'No Need To Argue' was such a huge album and it was the peak of The Cranberries really.
After that it got so big that it got completely out of control and it was really kind of crazy.
I lost my mind completely and it was just crazy; just the paranoia and the fans and being followed and then getting to a point where I could never relax at all, it just got so difficult,” she confesses.
“Then a third album came out and I lost tons of weight and had a nervous breakdown and I kind of said I have to get away from the music for a while and then I went to the forest and started having kids.
When I came back and was making music again I never opened up my heart again like I had on 'No Need To Argue' because when you open up your heart sometimes you are opening yourself up to be hurt.”
And while The Cranberries scaled the very heights of international success in their 13-year career, shifting over 40million albums, the critics, especially on this side of the Atlantic, were often less than kind when it came to dissecting their hit-and-miss musical output.
Rolling Stone magazine went as far as describing their 1996 album 'To The Faithfully Departed' as “insubstantial as a bowl of dry Crunch Berries”.
“You have to let bygones be bygones and sometimes time is a wonderful healer and I've learned to open up again like a flower if you know what I mean.
For a while it was like I'll write a song but I'm not going writing it about anything seriously deeply emotional here.
But as time goes by you really learn to go so deep down inside your own heart and your own psychology and your own soul and kind of throw the stuff out there.
For me it's always a therapeutic process and when people listen to the new album they will relate to those thoughts.”
With her new album, the kooky rockstar has been taking a closer look at her place in life.
Splitting her time these days between Dublin and Ontario, Canada, 'No Baggage' was written and directly inspired by the solace of life “deep in the woods”.
The result is a bright, clean record that is more unpredictable and experimentative than we have come to expect from the former Cranberries singer in the past.
Dolores's still-astoundingly emotive voice takes centrestage throughout on tracks such as the gorgeous piano ballad 'Lunatic' or the forthright, anthemic rocker 'Be Careful'.
But there's also room for sonic experimentation, most obviously on 'Throw Your Arms Around Me' with its Indian-styled instrumentation and strucuture.
“It's really exciting and I'm really proud of the songs. It's a very dynamic record, it's a lot more dynamic than the debut solo record and I think it's very up and down.
It's got songs that are full of hope and overall it's a very hopeful record.
I went a bit more experimental this time around. There's a song called 'Throw Your Arms Around Me', which is influenced by Native American music.
There's a reserve near us where it's just all Native Americans and I've been collecting the CDs. I also do a lot of meditation and stuff so I'm slightly influenced by that in this song.
There's this really beautiful world music vibe, it's fairly tribal and it just goes a little bit wacky sometimes and then it gets normal and then it goes wacky, but it's unpredictable which is the thing.
For an artist it's important that you challenge yourself and try to do something you've never done before, or go to where you've never gone before,” O'Riordan proclaims.
She is obviously proud of the new record and its clear message that, no matter how bad things may seem, it's not really that bad in the greater scheme of things.
'It's You' is laced with bittersweet nostalgia, 'Stupid' is self-critical and 'Skeleton' advises you to learn to accept your experiences and see how they've made you the person you are.
''This album is full of songs that I couldn't have written when I was in The Cranberries because I wouldn't have had the experiences I've had in the last six years if I didn't take some time out for myself.
But honestly when I'm writing lyrics sometimes you just look at them on a page and they look absolutely God awful and you go, Jesus that looks real psycho.
Then when you put them with the music it all fits together and starts to make sense.
So usually when I have lyrics written and they are thrown all over the house my husband picks them up and starts reading them and I'm like don't read it, wait until it's recorded and then you hear it all together.
I'm one of those songwriters where everything is my secret in my notebook until I'm ready to sing it,'' Dolores reveals.
The single-minded Limerick woman is back in the public eye once again for the first time since the release of her debut solo album 'Are You Listening?' in 2007.
Early reports on Dolly's slyly-titled new album, 'No Baggage' are extremely favourable which should bode well for ticket sales to her world tour which kicks of in the US this September.
''I'm tearing away now at the minute. It's all going really well so far, really positive, which helps.
I've left the forest for now and I'm starting off the American tour in September and then I'll be in Europe and Ireland for some shows at the end of October.''
With the likes of Elton John and Rod Stewart rocking out Thomond Park this year, any chance we might be able to expect a Dolores O'Riordan concert in her native city at some point in the future?
''You never know, never say never. Stranger things have happened so you never know. I'd love to do a concert in Limerick.''
O'Riordan's new album, 'No Baggage', will be released on Monday August 24. The album will be preceded by a two-track download only single, 'The Journey/Loser' on Monday August 10.
The second half of Alan Jacques's interview with Dolores O'Riordan will feature in next week's
Limerick Independent
in which she talks about her feelings for Limerick, the likelihood of a Cranberries reunion and well, life as we know it.
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