(Photo credit should read GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images) It sounds like The Cranberries found some kind of closure in this last record. On it, O’Riordan, who recorded demos for the album’s 11 tracks before her death in January last year, sings: “Fighting’s not the answer/ Fighting’s not the cure/ It’s eating you like cancer/ It’s killing you for sure.” The band have spoken about how O’Riordan was singing about leaving many of the negative things in her life behind. “Wake Me When it’s Over”, the third track on In the End, could be “Zombie”’s twin. She was deeply affected by the deaths, and would no doubt have been devastated by recent events in Northern Ireland as well. “Zombie” was a protest song written by the band’s late frontwoman Dolores O’Riordan after two children were killed by IRA bombs – was released. There’s a cruel irony that the release of The Cranberries’ final album should come just a week after journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by the New IRA during a riot in Londonderry.
On the new album she still sighs that: “Spilling my guts with the Bowery bums/ Is the only love I’ve ever known/ Except for the stage, which I also call home.” She’s not just a rich kid imagining the self-destructive characters in her songs: she spent five years listening to them before bringing their voices out of the shadows. She was signed by an independent label in 2007 but her debut album was shelved, and she threw herself into working with the homeless and on drug and alcohol outreach projects. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.” Her childhood included singing in church and being packed off to boarding school, aged 14, to recover from alcohol addiction.Īt 18, she picked up the guitar and began playing in nightclubs as Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena, and other characters. No moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality. “My mother told me I had a chameleon soul.
“I was always an unusual girl,” runs the song.
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