Dolores O’Riordan, September 6, 1971-January 15, 2018

The mid-nineties were a heady time. Sales of CDs were filling record-company coffers, and the first dot.com boom was just picking up steam; people still believed that the internet could be a source of education, and not a mountain of cat videos, click-bait news stories, and non-Presidential Presidential tweeting. (A mistake that was also made during the early days of TV; when was the last time a you saw “Sunrise Semester”?)

The Cranberries were a perfect band for the time. There was a loveliness to the music, mixed a surprising strength. Their hits—”Dreams,” “Linger,” and “Zombie”— with their tufted melodies, and pillowy guitars (produced by Stephen Smith, who also produced the Smiths) were dreamy soon-pop. But Dolores O’Riordan, the band’s gamine singer, was not one easily swayed. The was a unbowed core to her voice, as vulnerable and creamy as it might sound at the edges. She might beg “don’t hurt me” in “Dreams,” a love song that starts tremulously but eventually decides to jump in, head first. “Zombie” is made of rougher stuff, a mournful but sharp-tongued response to an IRA bombing. Our playlist’s final song, “When We Were Young,” is from her first solo album, Are You Listening?, a tough sounding, more emphatic album  that found her working in the vein of Sinead O’Connor.

While the band had been off our radar since their run of hits, it was still a shock when the band’s publicist announced O’Riordan’s death this morning. We send out condolences to her family, friends, and fans.

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.

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