Ethereal Girl

It’s June 11 2009, and sitting by a bay window in the upstairs lobby of Dublin’s Westbury Hotel, grazing over a large fruit salad bowl, the elfin-like, newly-blonde and always quirky Dolores O’Riordan is giving Hot Press the hard sell on her forthcoming second solo album, No Baggage.
“You know, it’d be great if it does well,” she says, speaking in a strong Limerick accent utterly undiminished by years of international travel and celebrity, “but to be honest with you, I’m not really all that worried either way.” As if to emphasise her unconcern, the 37-year-old delightedly spears a piece of fruit with a silver fork and holds it up for inspection. “Wow! Have you ever seen a blackberry that big?”
Having shifted more than 40 million albums during her Cranberries career, O’Riordan can easily afford to be blasé about her sales. Already one of Ireland’s wealthiest women, she sincerely maintains that she’s not in it for the money at this stage. “I’m not one of those mad greedy guts or anything. I’ve had a lot of luck, and made a lot. At the end of the day, I love making music anyway, to inspire people.”
Having said that, she may still be feeling a little burnt from her bum experience with her debut solo album. Although 2007’s Are You Listening? was critically lauded, her record label, Sanctuary, went belly-up midway through its promotional campaign.
“Oh, the shitty music industry, which I hate, man!” she sighs. “I signed to Sanctuary right after being with Universal for years and years and years. And after 17 years with The Cranberries, I took a four-year break from music; didn’t know that I’d ever go back, but did go back. But I was being very careful about what I signed and all that.
“So I signed to Sanctuary Records who had been around for ages. They started off as a management company for Iron Maiden, maybe 25 years ago. But they’ve been around forever and now they’ve become a record company, and I thought, that looks grand and solid – they’re indie and they’ll be good. Jesus, six months into Are you Listening? they got bought out by Universal in the States and they become defunct and everyone gets fired, and my record gets taken off the shelves. What a pain in the arse, man!”
You’d already sold about 350,000 albums at that stage, hadn’t you?
“I don’t really know, actually. I didn’t really look at the numbers, to be honest with you, but it did pretty well, but it was only beginning, really, I thought. Because you bring out your first single and then you get your second one out. And you get out there and you try and get it up to the next level. You start here and then you try and get it up and up. But, sure, there was no CDs in the shops so what was the point being out there breaking my arse touring, you know?”
O’Riordan’s obviously slightly cynical about the music business at this stage. She laughingly sings a line from one of her new songs [‘Be Careful What You Wish For’] when I ask how she feels about illegal downloading. “’Be careful what you wish for!’ The music industry invented all the stuff, right? So again, you know, they should have thought about it really, shouldn’t they? It’s not really my problem, you know.”
Well, it will be if everybody downloads No Baggage for free and it becomes No Royalties . . .
“Ah well, sure people do that anyway,” she laughs. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just the way the world is. Keep your fingers crossed and if the music helps people through their journey and comforts them at the end of the day, whatever happens, happens. I can’t be in control of that stuff, you know. And I don’t really go around worrying about it. So I don’t really mind. Music is supposed to be free anyway.”
While she seems genuinely unconcerned about No Baggage’s commercial prospects, perhaps it’s just that O’Riordan just has more immediate matters to attend to. The album won’t be released for another two months, but before that she’ll have a hell of a lot of baggage to deal with. We’re doing an interview now because, in just a few days time, she and her husband, former Duran Duran tour manager Don Burton, will be packing up their Howth home and moving with their three children (aged 3-12) to his native Canada. “Don’s back home right now, packing stuff up, so it’s a bit of a madhouse at the moment.”
Are you planning a permanent move?
“Well, we’ll kind of play it by ear —I mean, Jesus, we’re always travelling. We are travellers, m’dear! As they say, it’s in the blood. So what happened was, the story is basically, the 12 year old, is going to high-school and he wanted to go there. And with the kids, really, I always try to move wherever it’s more appropriate for the children.”
The kids are unlikely to experience all that much culture shock, given that the family have been regularly visiting Burton’s homeland for many years (he has a 17-year-old child from a previous relationship still living there). Indeed, co-produced by Ontario-based producer, Dan Brodbeck, most of No Baggage was actually recorded in Canada.
“We recorded most of it in London, Ontario, where Dan has his studio. It’s kind of two hours west of Toronto. But it was literally – I did everything first creatively at home, and then I just flew in, they lads played, and that was it. Very quick. All the pre-production and all the creative stuff was done at my place. And so, in London, I’d say the whole thing was done in the studio in about 20 days. That’s fast, because you know the way you do loads of it now, and with ProTools you do all your creative stuff and demo it. And then you fly in and you know what you are doing.”
The sometimes highly emotive album sees O’Riordan wearing her heart on her sleeve in a way that she hasn’t since the second Cranberries album [1994’s No Need To Argue]. Looking forward and backwards – sometimes simultaneously – is one of the primary themes, as evidenced on such key tracks as the quasi-Beatles-esque ‘Fly Through’ and its yearning for unambiguous solutions, the bittersweet nostalgia of the catchy ‘It’s You’, and the blunt, seemingly self-flagellating ‘Stupid’.
“It’s at times very confessional and dealing with my true emotions,” she explains. “Everyone, through their experiences or their background, has had terrible moments where they think they can’t handle it. With this record I’m trying to show that, no matter how bad things may seem, it’s not really that bad in the big picture.”
Was it therapeutic to write?
“Well, I guess it was therapeutic, really. It’s like my therapy now. Instead of going to the shrink, I just write songs.”
Have you been to many shrinks?
“Oh yeah, I’ve been to loads!” she laughs. “They are nice guys, but they can get a bit pricey so now I just write songs instead.”
The track ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ seems to be about the pressures of sudden fame . . .
“Yeah, that’s part of it,” she concurs. “Life’s kind of funny because sometimes we think that we want something, right? And you think, ‘Oh, I want this!’ For me, when I was a little girl I always thought the idea of being a successful singer, being in a band, man – that’s what it’s all about! But then when it actually happened, it almost destroyed me at a certain point. So you know, you have to be careful of what you wish for because for every action there is a reaction; for everything we do there is a repercussion. So if you think about that, you don’t necessarily know what the repercussion is going to be, but you learn down the road, obviously.”
You sing the line, “Alcohol and cocaine, I think it’s driving you insane”. . .
“Yeah, well with the drug thing, I’ve got loads of friends and stuff, people who just went to the edge and ended up in rehab and all that stuff, and nearly destroyed themselves, and whatever. But they get better, they live to tell the tale and you learn from them. Most of them would go around to talk in classrooms and what-not, to try and inspire children, to know about the dangers of addiction.”
What’s your take on the Amy Winehouse car-crash?
“I wouldn’t like to judge, but I do hope that she gets through whatever point of her journey she is coming through. I have no idea what that girl’s life is about or anything. So I wouldn’t like to judge her, honestly. I just do hope that she recuperates and she comes through because she is a very, very talented girl. She has such a beautiful voice. And when she sings she has a lot of heart and soul in there as well. She sings from her heart.”
You had a fairly similar rise to fame yourself, didn’t you? One minute you were a nobody singer in a little-known indie band from Limerick, the next you were an international celebrity.
“It was very unpredictable, and very fast, really, and very overnight,” she nods. “But I think a lot of it was that we weren’t going out there and like, ‘Hey man, cool rock-stars. Check out my shades!’ and all that. We were kind of the opposite, we were pretty green and pretty naïve, but really just loved making music. And maybe we stuck out because of that freshness. I mean, they didn’t get much more fresh than we were. We were totally like twigs.”
Twigs?
“Yeah, we just cut this bunch from the hedge a minute ago, you know. We were really kind of naïve.”
Is that why you were attracted to Don? Having tour-managed Duran Duran for years, he would have known the rock and roll business inside out.
“Well no, that wasn’t it at all, actually. And you would imagine that, but no, I was in a really, really, bad relationship for many years and I was afraid to leave. It was one of those very heavy relationships that was overly controlling and I feared for my self and for my future. But when I met Don, he helped me to get out of that relationship, and he looked after me. And he took me and all my broken goods underneath his arm, and he promised me that he would mind me, basically.
“And I said to him, ‘You know what? I’m not going to fall in love with ya. I have just had my heart broken, I’m actually afraid to get into a relationship again. So if you want to have anything with me, it’s all or nothing’. It was kind of, ‘We get married, or see ya’. And he was like, ‘Okay, let’s get married’. And with that, I was kind of like, ‘What? Are you serious?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah’. And 15 years later, we’re still together.”
She’s obviously still very much in love with her husband. Once he’s been mentioned, she can’t stop talking about him. “I remember thinking he was just gorgeous, but I thought he was completely out of my league,” she recalls. “Completely unattainable. I mean, I’m still a small little punk with no tan, you know. I’ve got a little skin-head, I’m kind of, in my opinion, okay-looking. I’m not exactly a supermodel with these huge… endowed... melons. I was a little quirky, punky kind of girl. And I thought, there’s no way, now, he’s going to go for my type. But actually, he liked quirky girls, he liked quirky people. So maybe opposites attract.
“I had this little pink quiff of hair. And then his style was different to mine, he had these big cowboy boots from snakeskin. And he steps in and he is six-foot-four and I’m, like, five-foot-two, so he’s massive! I’m like, I couldn’t. What would I do with him anyway? Sure he’d break me! Throw me off the roof, you know. But actually, it was really funny, because sometimes really big men like really small girls. And I think he liked that kind of girl, he liked my personality an awful lot because I was a little bit eccentric and I wasn’t trying to be high-heels and all that.
“I always liked Doc Martens with really messed-up style, but at least I was thinking that my mind was more important than my body, anyway. And he liked that, because I’m sure he grew up in a massive city and I think sometimes people can become overly obsessed with how they appear, and lose their spiritual side, you know. There’s a balance, really. I mean, you can look nice and all that, but by the same token, you have to look after your spirit and your soul, too.”
Speaking of people who are obsessive about their what was the point being out there breaking my arse touring, you know?”
O’Riordan’s obviously slightly cynical about the music business at this stage. She laughingly sings a line from one of her new songs [‘Be Careful What You Wish For’] when I ask how she feels about illegal downloading. “’Be careful what you wish for!’ The music industry invented all the stuff, right? So again, you know, they should have thought about it really, shouldn’t they? It’s not really my problem, you know.”
Well, it will be if everybody downloads No Baggage for free and it becomes No Royalties . . .
“Ah well, sure people do that anyway,” she laughs. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just the way the world is. Keep your fingers crossed and if the music helps people through their journey and comforts them at the end of the day, whatever happens, happens. I can’t be in control of that stuff, you know. And I don’t really go around worrying about it. So I don’t really mind. Music is supposed to be free anyway.”
While she seems genuinely unconcerned about No Baggage’s commercial prospects, perhaps it’s just that O’Riordan just has more immediate matters to attend to. The album won’t be released for another two months, but before that she’ll have a hell of a lot of baggage to attend to. We’re doing an interview now because, in just a few days time, she and her husband, former Duran Duran tour manager Don Burton, will be packing up their Howth home and moving with their three children (aged 3-12) to his native Canada. “Don’s back home right now, packing stuff up, so it’s a bit of a madhouse at the moment.”
Are you planning a permanent move?
“Well, we’ll kind of play it by ear —I mean, Jesus, we’re always travelling. We are travellers, m’dear! As they say, it’s in the blood. So what happened was, the story is basically, the 12 year old, is going to high-school and he wanted to go there. And with the kids, really, I always try to move wherever it’s more appropriate for the children.”
The kids are unlikely to experience all that much culture shock, given that the family have been regularly visiting Burton’s homeland for many years (he has a 17-year-old child from a previous relationship still living there). Indeed, co-produced by Ontario-based producer, Dan Brodbeck, most of No Baggage was actually recorded in Canada.
“We recorded most of it in London, Ontario, where Dan has his studio. It’s kind of two hours west of Toronto. But it was literally – I did everything first creatively at home, and then I just flew in, they lads played, and that was it. Very quick. All the pre-production and all the creative stuff was done at my place. And so, in London, I’d say the whole thing was done in the studio in about 20 days. That’s fast, because you know the way you do loads of it now, and with ProTools you do all your creative stuff and demo it. And then you fly in and you know what you are doing.”
The sometimes highly emotive album sees O’Riordan wearing her heart on her sleeve in a way that she hasn’t since the second Cranberries album [1994’s No Need To Argue]. Looking forward and backwards – sometimes simultaneously – is one of the primary themes, as evidenced on such key tracks as the quasi-Beatles-esque ‘Fly Through’ and its yearning for unambiguous solutions, the bittersweet nostalgia of the catchy ‘It’s You’, and the blunt, seemingly self-flagellating ‘Stupid’.
“It’s at times very confessional and dealing with my true emotions,” she explains. “Everyone, through their experiences or their background, has had terrible moments where they think they can’t handle it. With this record I’m trying to show that, no matter how bad things may seem, it’s not really that bad in the big picture.”
Was it therapeutic to write?
“Well, I guess it was therapeutic, really. It’s like my therapy now. Instead of going to the shrink, I just write songs.”
Have you been to many shrinks?
“Oh yeah, I’ve been to loads!” she laughs. “They are nice guys, but they can get a bit pricey so now I just write songs instead.”
The track ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ seems to be about the pressures of sudden fame . . .
“Yeah, that’s part of it,” she concurs. “Life’s kind of funny because sometimes we think that we want something, right? And you think, ‘Oh, I want this!’ For me, when I was a little girl I always thought the idea of being a successful singer, being in a band, man – that’s what it’s all about! But then when it actually happened, it almost destroyed me at a certain point. So you know, you have to be careful of what you wish for because for every action there is a reaction; for everything we do there is a repercussion. So if you think about that, you don’t necessarily know what the repercussion is going to be, but you learn down the road, obviously.”
You sing the line, “Alcohol and cocaine, I think it’s driving you insane”. . .
“Yeah, well with the drug thing, I’ve got loads of friends and stuff, people who just went to the edge and ended up in rehab and all that stuff, and nearly destroyed themselves, and whatever. But they get better, they live to tell the tale and you learn from them. Most of them would go around to talk in classrooms and what-not, to try and inspire children [and] to know about the dangers of addiction.”
What’s your take on the Amy Winehouse car-crash?
“I wouldn’t like to judge, but I do hope that she gets through whatever point of her journey she is coming through. It’s not for me to judge others, and I have no idea what that girl’s life is about or anything. So I wouldn’t like to judge her, honestly. I just do hope that she recuperates and she comes through because she is a very, very talented girl. She has such a beautiful voice. And when she sings she has a lot of heart and soul in there as well. She sings from her heart, so I would love to see her coming through. Hopefully, she will shine through, upwards and onwards, you know.”
You had a fairly similar rise to fame yourself, didn’t you? One minute you were a nobody singer in a little-known indie band from Limerick, the next you were an international celebrity.
“It was very unpredictable, and very fast, really, and very overnight,” she nods. “But I think a lot of it was that we weren’t going out there and like, ‘Hey man, cool rock stars. Check out my shades!’ and all that. We were kind of the opposite, we were pretty green and pretty naïve, but really just loved making music. And maybe we stuck out because of that freshness. I mean, they didn’t get much more fresh than we were. We were totally like twigs.”
Twigs?
“Yeah, we just cut this bunch from the hedge a minute ago, you know. We were really kind of naïve.”
Is that why you were attracted to Don? Having tour-managed Duran Duran for years, he would have known the rock and roll business inside out.
“Well no, that wasn’t it at all, actually. And you would imagine that, but no, I was in a really, really, bad relationship for many years and I was afraid to leave. It was one of those very heavy relationships that was overly controlling and I feared for my self and for my future. But when I met Don, he helped me to get out of that relationship, and he looked after me. And he took me and all my broken goods underneath his arm, and he promised me that he would mind me, basically.
“And I said to him, ‘You know what? I’m not going to fall in love with ya. I have just had my heart broken, I’m actually afraid to get into a relationship again. So if you want to have anything with me, it’s all or nothing’. It was kind of, ‘We get married, or see ya’. And he was like, ‘Okay, let’s get married’. And with that, I was kind of like, ‘What? Are you serious?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah’. And 15 years later, we’re still together.”
She’s obviously still very much in love with her husband. Once he’s been mentioned, she can’t stop talking about him. “I remember thinking he was just gorgeous, but I thought he was completely out of my league,” she recalls. “Completely unattainable. I mean, I’m still a small little punk with no tan, you know. I’ve got a little skin-head, I’m kind of, in my opinion, okay-looking. I’m not exactly a supermodel with these huge … endowed . . . melons. I was a little quirky, punky kind of girl. And I thought, there’s no way, now, he’s going to go for my type. But actually, he liked quirky girls, he liked quirky people. So maybe opposites attract.
“I had this little pink quiff of hair. And then his style was different to mine, he had these big cowboy boots from snakeskin. And he steps in and he is six-foot-four and I’m, like, five-foot-two, so he’s massive! I’m like, I couldn’t. What would I do with him anyway? Sure he’d break me! Throw me off the roof, you know. But actually, it was really funny, because sometimes really big men like really small girls. And I think he liked that kind of girl, he liked my personality an awful lot because I was a little bit eccentric and I wasn’t trying to be high-heels and all that.
“I always liked Doc Martens with really messed-up style, but at least I was thinking that my mind was more important than my body, anyway. And he liked that, because I’m sure he grew up in a massive city and I think sometimes people can become overly obsessed with how they appear, and lose their spiritual side, you know. There’s a balance, really. I mean, you can look nice and all that, but by the same token, you have to look after your spirit and your soul, too.”
Speaking of people who are obsessive about their looks, who’s been the most pretentious celebrity that you’ve encountered over the years?
She pulls a face, unwilling to rise to the bait: “I can’t really say anyone in particular, to be honest with you. Because you see, the thing is I’m not really a controversial person. I don’t really court controversy. At the end of the day, I bring out music for me and for my fans. I’m not really one of these artists that has worked from controversy. I have always just worked from song-writing and gigging. And so generally, when it comes to criticising others, I really don’t see the point because criticism comes from a lack of love inside yourself.
“You criticise other people because you are not really happy with yourself,” she continues. “Anger comes from the fact that you are angry with yourself. Hatred and all that stuff is coming from inside yourself, so as you get older and you learn to get to know yourself more and more, and why you might have certain issues, you learn to confront them and you learn to stop judging others because you also learn to stop hating yourself, or being mean to yourself, or running from yourself. At the end of the day, I think everybody has elements of themselves that they don’t like, that they really hate. But as you get older you learn to kind of learn to love everything, warts and all, scabs and everything.”
Is that what the album’s title, No Baggage, is referring to? The fact that you’ve maybe dealt with your issues?
“Yeah, yeah. It’s really about that, that self-healing when you kind of get to know yourself. And you learn to love yourself and all your weaknesses. The last album was kind of about evolution. And this one is more philosophical I would say.”
Are you still in touch with your former Cranberries bandmates?
“Yeah, we all got together last Saturday week. My son had his confirmation so we all got together, all the Cran-babies got together. There’s 11 in all. Eleven kids between the four of us. They’re all really cute. We took a picture of them all and gave it to each other. It was really nice, actually. It was nice to get together, now.”
Would you ever consider a reunion?
“Why not?” she shrugs. “Down the road, definitely it would be something that I would look at. And if it made sense, essentially. But not straight away, or anything. I mean my plate is kind of full now because I’m moving, and I’ve got a lot going on with the kids starting school and all that stuff – settling in. And then release the record and, if it catches on, I’ll go out on tour. And if it doesn’t, well then I won’t, and then I’ll see what I’ll see what I’ll do next year, because I’m not really sure enough to see that far ahead.”
Do you have a motto or guiding philosophy in life?
“Yeah. Life is about really enjoying the sense of things. Like every morning that you wake up and you get out of bed, if you can see, and you can walk and talk; you’ve got your hands; you’ve got your feet; you’ve got beautiful children that are perfect. Is the glass half-empty or half-full? It is always half-full when you look at your blessings. So we are really blessed and it is really important to enjoy each moment and to focus on the beautiful things, and then you don’t get depressed and you don’t get stressed – because stress is bad because it makes you sick, anyway. It means that trying to stay positive is really important.”
Tell me something that the public doesn’t know about you.
Dolores O’Riordan shrieks with laughter. “I’m not telling because then they’d know, wouldn’t they? So there you go.” She cheekily sticks out her tongue: “Nah-nah!!”
She may be carrying no baggage, but this talented Limerick lady has quite some distance left to travel...