Dolores O'Riordan

• 1. Introduction

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  Dolores O'Riordan was twelve years old on her first day at Laurel Hill Coláiste in Limerick. She stood in front of her new classmates and announced, "My name is Dolores O'Riordan and I'm going to be a rock star". Then she stood on her chair and sang "Tra la la la la, Triangle". The school's principal, Aedín Ní Bhriain, later described the moment to the Limerick Post.

  The boast sounds like a child's fantasy. It turned out to be a forecast. O'Riordan became the lead vocalist of the Cranberries, and her voice grew into one of the most recognisable in alternative rock. It had a lilting tone, a signature yodel, a mournful keening and a strong Limerick accent that she never sanded down.

  Where did that sound come from? How does a girl from a Catholic, working-class family in County Limerick end up carrying a band to audiences across the world? And what did that success cost the person standing at the centre of it?

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• 2. Ballybricken Childhood

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  Nine children were born into the O'Riordan household in Ballybricken, County Limerick, although two of them died in infancy. Dolores Mary Eileen, the youngest, was born on the 6th of September 1971. Her father, Terence Patrick, known as Terry, had worked as a farm labourer until a motorbike accident in 1968 left him brain damaged. Her mother, Eileen, worked as a school caterer. The family was devoutly Roman Catholic, and Eileen named her youngest daughter in reference to the Lady of the Seven Dolours.

  Dolores was five when her school principal took her into the sixth class, sat her on the teacher's desk and told her to sing for the twelve-year-olds. She had been singing since before she could talk. At school she took up traditional Irish music and the Irish tin whistle. By the age of ten, her uncles were taking her to sing in local pubs.

  When Dolores was seven, her sister accidentally burned the family house down. The rural community raised enough money to buy the family a new homestead. Life in a small, close-knit place shaped her early years as much as the music did.

  For ten years she played the harmonium in her local church, where she also sang as a liturgical soloist in the choir. Piano lessons began when she was twelve. She eventually reached Grade 4 in Practical and Grade 8 in Theory.

  Her school friend Catherina Egan remembered her as "boisterous, wild, but lovely". At Laurel Hill she played the spoons and the bodhrán. Each day she sat at the piano in the main hall, and her classmates gathered around her after lunch to listen. At seventeen she learned the guitar and played a solo gig at the school. That same year she met her first boyfriend, Mike O'Mahoney.

  During her six years at Laurel Hill, O'Riordan won the Slógadh song contest almost every year, working up from local events to national competitions. She collected 20 Slógadh medals in total. She later admitted that she neglected her schoolwork to write songs, yet she still became head girl. Former principal Anne Mordan remembered a "delightful, unsophisticated, sensitive student, who enjoyed her time with us".

  Her mother, whom she adored, hoped she might become a nun, or go to college and train as a music teacher. At eighteen, O'Riordan ran away from home instead and lived for a couple of years with her boyfriend. She explained it to Vox magazine: "At 18 I left home because I wanted to sing." She added that she was really poor for a year and a half and remembered being so hungry she would have died for a bag of chips. "That's when I joined the Cranberries", she said.

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• 3. The Sunday Audition

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  In 1989, brothers Mike and Noel Hogan formed a band in Limerick with the drummer Fergal Lawler and a singer named Niall Quinn. Mike played bass and Noel played guitar. They called themselves the Cranberry Saw Us. Within a year Quinn had left, but he told the others that his girlfriend knew a girl who wanted to join a band playing original material.

  Mid-1990 brought a Sunday afternoon that changed the group. Quinn arrived at the rehearsal room with O'Riordan. Noel Hogan later recalled, "I remember she was shy, very soft-spoken. Not the Dolores that everyone grew to know." He added that walking in on a gang of young men must have been intimidating for her.

  She sang a couple of songs she had written, and she also sang "Troy" by Sinéad O'Connor. The band was impressed. They handed her a cassette of instrumentals and asked whether she could work on it. She came back with a rough version of "Linger", and she was hired.

  Hogan told Rolling Stone that "the minute she sang, you know, it was like your jaw drops at her voice". He said she was musically far superior to him, because she had been doing it all her life.

  O'Riordan was still a student at Laurel Hill Coláiste when she joined, and she was working toward her Leaving Certificate. She told The Guardian in 1995 that she wanted "a band with no barriers, where I could write my own songs". Her marks were good, but academic study held little interest for her. She left school without any qualifications.

  A three-track tape EP called Nothing Left at All, released by the local label Xeric Records, sold 300 copies. Pearse Gilmore, who owned Xeric Studios, became the band's manager. He gave them studio time and produced another demo tape that held early versions of "Linger" and "Dreams". Copies went to record companies in the UK. The tape drew attention from the British press and the industry, and a bidding war broke out among labels. The band signed with Island Records, changed its name to the Cranberries and released a four-track EP called Uncertain.

  Early touring across Ireland and the UK meant low income, floors for beds and cramped vans. Overcoming her shyness took longer. Fergal Lawler later described those first performances, when O'Riordan sang with her back to the audience. "We just went up, and we had six songs. Dolores was turned to the side; Noel, Mike and I had our heads down."

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• 4. Zombie and Stardom

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  The album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? arrived in 1993 and went to number one. It held the two songs that defined the band's early years, "Dreams" and "Linger". "Linger" reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 when O'Riordan was only 22.

  Early in 1994, she injured her cruciate ligament in a ski accident at Val-d'Isère in the Alps. She underwent major surgery. In September 1994 the band released "Zombie", the lead single from the follow-up album, No Need to Argue.

  The song reached number one on Triple J's Hottest 100, the first time a female-led band had topped Australia's biggest song poll. O'Riordan stood alone in the countdown's history for 16 years. As of 2024, she remains one of only four women to sing on a number one song on that list.

  No Need to Argue took the Cranberries to their commercial peak. It was the top-selling album worldwide in the first half of 1995, and the best-selling album of the year by a European artist. Its songs included "Ode to My Family", "I Can't Be with You" and "Ridiculous Thoughts". The biggest international hit was "Zombie", which topped singles charts in several countries. Dan Weiss of Billboard wrote that it "could crush an entire room with the combined largesse of O'Riordan's ocean-swallowing voice".

  The leg injury returned without warning, and it forced the cancellation of three Irish concerts planned for December 1994. The press reacted badly. The audience was more forgiving, because O'Riordan had said the shows were postponed rather than cancelled, with new dates set for June 1995.

  In the 1990s, O'Riordan became a style icon with a pixie cut or buzzed hair, and she performed barefoot. She said it simply felt comfortable and honest to pull her toes along the ground. William Goodman of Billboard pictured her striding onstage as "an Irish warrior poet with a bleached blonde pixie cut". The New York Times credited her with a large share of the decade's Dr. Martens boot sales. After a concert at London's Royal Albert Hall in January 1995, the author Alec Foege called her "part Audrey Hepburn, part David Bowie". On the 23rd of March 1995, she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.

  On the 12th of September 1995, O'Riordan joined Luciano Pavarotti in Modena, Italy, for a benefit concert in his Pavarotti & Friends series. It was called Together for the Children of Bosnia, and it raised money for War Child. She sang "Ave Maria" with him, and she sang "Linger" as a duet with Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Princess Diana, who was in the audience, told O'Riordan that the song had brought her to tears.

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• 5. Voice and Craft

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  O'Riordan's vocal range stretched from B2 to C6, which made her a mezzo-soprano. She seldom sang in the fifth octave and preferred a range where she felt at ease. Her tone was light rather than heavy, with a soft projection on her lowest notes. She could belt in the manner of 1990s alternative rock, and she was devoted to falsetto.

  Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times described "a high, airy tone that could turn ferocious without warning". Her style combined lilting phrases, mournful keening, glottal ornamentation and a distinctive attack on syllables. The University of Limerick wrote that her voice carried strong traces of Sean-nós, the old Gaelic tradition of unaccompanied singing that conveys sadness, regret and loneliness.

  The yodel came from her father, who sang that way. O'Riordan realised it could work in the Cranberries' format, because much of it appeared in religious Irish music. She never softened her strong Irish accent, even when she was criticised for it. "Íosa", an outtake from the debut album, is the only song she sang entirely in Irish Gaelic.

  Melody Maker called her voice "the voice of a saint trapped in a glass harp". Ireland's Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, called her "the voice of a generation". Around the age of 40, the timbre of her voice changed and grew more mature.

  Her deeply religious mother introduced her to Elvis Presley at an early age. Years of church music also brought her to Gregorian chant, which she said had "great melodies". Months before she died, she tested the resonance and acoustics of the church at Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, hoping to sing there.

  In her teens, her brothers listened to heavy metal, while she loved rock and Gaelic folk music in equal measure. At sixteen she began listening to the Smiths, the Cure, R.E.M. and Depeche Mode. She named Presley and John Lennon as particularly large early influences. She wrote "I'm Still Remembering" six months after the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. In 1995 she met James Hetfield of Metallica.

  At twelve, O'Riordan wrote her first song, called "Calling". In the band she was the lead lyricist and co-composer with the guitarist Noel Hogan. In the early days, Hogan gave her a sequence of chords, and a week later she returned with finished lyrics for "Linger". She wrote "Sunday" shortly afterward.

  She and Hogan never sat in a room and wrote at the same time. O'Riordan wrote ideas down all day, and most melodies came at night because she struggled with insomnia. Hogan said her emails arrived like text messages: fifteen of them, each two lines long, at two o'clock in the morning. She told The Independent that writing lyrics was "about the things you need to talk about, I write to get my emotions out. It's self-therapeutic".

  The producer Dan Brodbeck said that on her first day in the studio for her solo project, she played him a few chords and a piano medley and then left him alone. She came back hours later, approved his work and sang lyrics off the top of her head. "It was always spur-of-the-moment, gut reaction stuff", he said. Gil Moore, owner of Metalworks Studios, called her "a God-given talent".

  At Xeric Studios, at the start of 1990, Hogan noticed that she layered harmonies and falsetto from the first session. She used a Neumann U 87 microphone on the debut album and usually needed only three or four takes. Backing vocals went quickly, because Hogan said she had an amazing ear for tuning. When she sang "Linger", the people in the room looked at each other and wondered where that voice had come from, because she was so small.

  She let her breathing stay audible on the records. Her rule was "keep it natural, keep it real", because cleaning up every breath took away from the reality. She worried about oversinging and smothering the raw emotion, so over the years she stopped working in the studio during daylight. Lawler told Rolling Stone, "in the evening time, you're almost looking out in the corridor to see if she's coming in."

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• 6. Beyond the Band

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  On the 11th of December 1998, O'Riordan and the Cranberries played the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum in Norway. The following year the band released Bury the Hatchet. It reached number one on the Canadian Albums Chart and the European Top 100 Albums, but it did not match the sales of the first two albums. Its world tour ran from April 1999 to July 2000 and was the band's biggest ever. Wake Up and Smell the Coffee followed on the 22nd of October 2001.

  On the 15th of December 2001, O'Riordan sang solo at the annual Vatican Christmas concert for Pope John Paul II. A 67-piece orchestra accompanied her through "Analyse", "Panis angelicus", "Little Drummer Boy" and "Silent Night". The show was broadcast to well over 200 million people. She was invited back in December 2002 and again in December 2005, when she sang a duet with the Italian tenor Gian Luca Terranova. Her final Vatican appearance came in December 2013, in a duet with Elisa Toffoli. She had met Pope John Paul II in 2001 and 2002, and she admired him.

  On the 7th of February 2002, in Dublin, the band announced that all proceeds from their single "Time Is Ticking Out" would go to the Chernobyl Children's Project. Ali Hewson and the project's founder, Adi Roche, joined O'Riordan at the Clarence Hotel. She had written the song in spring 2001, after Hewson and Roche showed her images of children affected by the Chernobyl disaster of the 26th of April 1986. "I had just given birth to my second child, a beautiful healthy little girl", she explained, and she was so moved that the song came quickly.

  In June 2003, O'Riordan met AC/DC's Brian Johnson while the Cranberries played shows with AC/DC and the Rolling Stones. They began work on a rock opera about Helen of Troy, a production budgeted at $1.2 million. The project was put on hold. In 2004 she sang "Pure Love" on Zucchero's album Zu & Co. and provided vocals for the Evilenko soundtrack with the composer Angelo Badalamenti. He called her "a wonderful lyricist with an edge to her voice". On the 23rd of June 2006, she appeared in the Adam Sandler comedy Click as a wedding singer performing a string version of "Linger".

  In 2003, the Cranberries took a temporary break. O'Riordan said she had become a prisoner of her own celebrity and could not find balance in her life. She signed a solo deal with Sanctuary Records in December 2006. Are You Listening? came out in May 2007, produced in part by Martin "Youth" Glover, and it peaked at number 77 on the Billboard 200. She toured more than 22 countries that year. In August 2007 Sanctuary's UK division was bought by Universal for about $88 million. On the 19th of November 2007, illness forced her to cancel the rest of her European tour.

  In January 2009, the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin named her an honorary member and invited the Cranberries to play a reunion concert. "The minute we started playing it felt like we'd never stopped", she said. Her second solo album, No Baggage, followed in August 2009, and critics received it poorly. On the 25th of August 2009, she announced a Cranberries Reunion World Tour of 107 concerts. By 2010, vocal cord nodules had forced her doctor to prescribe six weeks without performing. The problem recurred until 2012.

  The band recorded Roses with the producer Stephen Street, and it was released in February 2012. In 2013, O'Riordan replaced Sharon Corr as a mentor on RTÉ's The Voice of Ireland. Her act Kellie Lewis finished second. She left after one season, because flights from Dublin to Canada during seven weeks of filming had damaged her health. In 2014 she began recording with Andy Rourke of the Smiths and the producer Olé Koretsky as the trio D.A.R.K. Their album Science Agrees appeared in September 2016.

  In late April 2017, for the band's 25th anniversary, the Cranberries released Something Else. It offered acoustic versions of their hits with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, plus three new songs. A world tour began in May 2017, with O'Riordan mostly seated on a stool. After eleven shows she was reported to be in excruciating pain from her mid to upper spine, and the sold-out European and North American dates were cancelled. Her last public performance was on the 14th of December 2017, when she sang three Cranberries songs at Billboard's Christmas party in New York. The next day Eminem released Revival, which used a large sample of "Zombie" in his song "In Your Head".

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• 7. The Cost of Fame

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  During the Free to Decide World Tour of 1996-97, O'Riordan and the band cancelled the remaining dates and announced a break for 1997. She told the Irish Examiner, "I was very depressed and I was extremely anorexic on that record, and as it came out I got progressively worse". The album, To the Faithful Departed, had debuted at number two in the UK and number four in the US. The decision to stop was hers. Management and the record company "went mental", but the rest of the group supported her. Stephen Street later said she might have been more measured, "but that wasn't her way".

  From the age of eight until twelve, O'Riordan was sexually abused by a family friend whom she trusted. She said it led to depression, deep self-loathing and suicidal thoughts, which her accelerating career made worse. At her father's funeral in 2011, the man introduced himself to her and apologised. She said in 2013 that she had suffered nightmares for a year before her father's death about meeting him. In October 2013, she told the journalist Barry Egan that she had once attempted suicide by overdosing on medication, but that she "wanted to live for her kids".

  On the 18th of July 1994, she married Don Burton, a Canadian-born former tour manager for Duran Duran, at Holy Cross Abbey in County Tipperary. They met on the road when the two bands toured together. They had three children, and O'Riordan also had a stepson from Burton's earlier relationship. The family moved often, among homes in Clare, Kerry, Dublin and Ontario. In 1998 they bought a 150-acre stud farm in Kilmallock, County Limerick, which they sold for US$5 million in 2004. By 2008 she ranked sixth on a list of the richest artists in Ireland, with a net worth of $66 million.

  Money did not cure the strain. In April 2014 she told Barry Egan that the record business had made her "extraordinarily wealthy" but had sucked the blood out of her, like a ferocious vampire.

  O'Riordan's father died on the 25th of November 2011, after six years fighting cancer. According to her, he held on until their 50th wedding anniversary on the 14th of November. His death hit her hard. In November 2012 she admitted that she had been unable to sing "Ode to My Family" through the 32 shows of the second European leg of the Roses tour. "I hope to be able to sing it back one day, but for now, it's too soon", she said.

  Her marriage to Burton ended in September 2014 after 20 years. She moved to New York and lived first in a hotel in Union Square and then at Trump Tower. On the 10th of November 2014, she was arrested and charged over her behaviour on an Aer Lingus flight from JFK International Airport to Shannon Airport. She was verbally and physically abusive to the crew, and she resisted police, shouting, "I'm the Queen of Limerick! I'm an icon!" She spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital and pleaded guilty. Her mother said she was in a fragile mental state, and tests found no alcohol or drugs in her system. The judge agreed to dismiss the charges if she apologised in writing to her victims and paid €6,000 to the court poor box.

  O'Riordan returned to the US in January 2015 and bought an apartment in New York's East Village. That year she began a relationship with Olé Koretsky, who shared her final years. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2015 and discussed it publicly in May 2017. In 2017 she bought a new house near Limerick. She said that depression, whatever its cause, was one of the worst things to go through, but that she had also had a lot of joy, especially with her children.

  In September 2017, while taking lorazepam and drinking, she started writing a suicide note. On the 26th of December 2017, an American psychotherapist assessed her, recommended that she abstain from alcohol and noted no suicidal thoughts. Her final social media post, on the 4th of January 2018, looked ahead to the future.

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• 8. January 2018 and After

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  On the 15th of January 2018, O'Riordan was found unresponsive in the bathroom of a London hotel room and pronounced dead at 9:16 a.m. She was 46. She lived in New York City and had travelled to London to work with Martin "Youth" Glover on D.A.R.K. and to meet representatives of the BMG record label about a new Cranberries album. She had checked into the Hilton on Park Lane the day before. At 2 a.m. on the morning she died, she spoke to her mother by phone.

  At 1:12 a.m. that morning, she left a voice message for her friend Dan Waite, offering to sing on a cover of "Zombie" that he had sent her. The metal band Bad Wolves released that cover on the 18th of January 2018, and it charted on several Billboard lists. TMZ published her voice message on the 5th of April 2018.

  An inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court on the 6th of September ruled that she died of accidental drowning in a bath, following sedation by alcohol intoxication. Her blood alcohol content was 330 mg/dL. Toxicology found only "therapeutic" levels of her prescription medications. The day after her death, the tabloid Santa Monica Observer ran a false story that fentanyl had been found in her room and that authorities suspected suicide. The rumour lasted for months.

  From the 20th to the 22nd of January, O'Riordan lay in repose at St Joseph's Church in her hometown. In a tribute normally reserved for heads of state, thousands filed past her open coffin during a four-hour public reposing. She wore black and held pearl rosary beads. Mourners travelled from Spain, China and South America. A floral tribute from friends read, "The song has ended, but the memories linger on".

  She was buried on the 23rd of January, after a service at Saint Ailbe's Roman Catholic Church in Ballybricken. It opened with her studio recording of "Ave Maria" with Pavarotti, and it closed with the Cranberries' "When You're Gone". Her mother, her three children, Don Burton, Olé Koretsky, the whole band and President Michael D. Higgins attended, along with Ali Hewson. She was buried alongside her father. Her grave has since become a place of pilgrimage.

  Hours after the news broke, Bono and Johnny Depp performed a tribute at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, ending on "Linger". Her image appeared on the huge screen at Madison Square Garden during a New York Rangers game. On the 28th of January 2018, the Grammy Awards honoured her in the In Memoriam segment. U2 said, "out of the West came this storm of a voice". On the 29th of March 2018, Mayor Stephen Keary gave her mother a book of condolences with more than 16,000 signatures.

  On the 19th of August 2018-82,000 people at Croke Park heard "Dreams" after Limerick won the Liam MacCarthy Cup for the first time in 45 years. The team later took the cup to her family home in Ballybricken. On the 24th of April 2019, the duo Saint Sister sang "Dreams" a cappella at the funeral of Lyra McKee in Belfast.

  In the first 24 hours after her death was announced, Amazon sales of Something Else jumped by 913,350%, and her solo album No Baggage rose by 200,000%. Four Cranberries albums entered the iTunes Top 10, and Stars: The Best of 1992-2002 peaked at number 2. In the months afterward, Billboard named her "The Top Female Artist of All Time" on its Alternative Songs chart. Over her career with the band she sold more than 40 million albums. She also received the Ivor Novello International Achievement award.

  In mid-September 2018, Noel Hogan confirmed that the band would end after one last album. "We don't want to continue without Dolores, so we're just going to leave after this", he said. That album, In the End, appeared in 2019 with her final vocal recordings, and it was nominated for a Grammy. Hogan said there would be no Auto-Tune, because she would have killed them.

  Rolling Stone said that in 1995 the Cranberries were Ireland's biggest musical export since U2. Una Mullally of The New York Times argued that her native accent made them a truly Irish band, and that American radio and music videos in heavy rotation drove their global success. Amanda Petrusich noted that while other rock singers of the time sounded hopelessly cool and aloof, O'Riordan sounded like a maniac. Her influence reached Asia, where the BBC said she was a major influence on the Chinese pop star Faye Wong. Maggie Rogers said her voice helped her understand her place in the world.

  On the 19th of February 2018, RTÉ One broadcast Dolores, a 40-minute documentary produced by Dave Fanning that included never-before-seen interviews. On the 6th of September 2023, which would have been her 52nd birthday, an album of solo songs she had recorded a few years before her death was announced.

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