[jv11]

Долорес дала шикарное интервью испанскому гей-порталу Chueca.com. Несмотря на это, интервью очень информативное.

Оказывается, Stay With Me рассказывает об отце Долорес, у которого был рак. :( Сейчас отцу уже лучше, но все равно - такого мы не знали. :( Тогда эта песня приобретает еще более страшный смысл... А я-то думал, она про Дона...

И Долорес любит Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Metallica, Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy и Evanescence. :)))


Dolores O’Riordan: Lesbian icon?

March 13th, 2007 by Alex

“If women find me attractive, that’s great. If men find me attractive, that’s fine too,” Dolores O’Riordan says in an interview for Spanish gay portal Chueca.com. The site, which proclaims her a lesbian icon (er?), asks her about religion and about the androgynous look that she sported for most of The Cranberries’ early career.

Interview with Dolores

Dolores O’Riordan announced the temporary separation of the Cranberries in 2003. But she has not until now decided to publish her new album. We spoke with her on her new release, “Are you listening”, on sale in May, on the future of her old band and on how it feels for a religious person like her to be a gay-lesbian icon.

Q:If you could imagine how the Cranberries 6th record would to be, what would be the difference between that record and “Are you listening”
D: It would be a completely differenct record, because the songs I wrote with the guys were completely different.

Q: However, songs like “Loser” or “When we were young” would fit in a Cranberries album.
D: Yes, because I wrote 70% of the Cranberries music and I write my own songs now. I haven’t changed, and I’m still the same person, and also the same singer. My record is more experimental and for the first time I’ve had to take care of everything myself. Different musicians helped me, and for the first time it’s been pretty experimental. It took me way longer, but I enjoy taking everything calmly, relaxing, and resting.

Q: The first time that there where rumors of your solo career was in the early 90s. When was the first time you really thought about it?
D: Not until I record the “Greatest Hits”. Before it had gone through my head, but I knew I wanted to finish what I had with the guys: the 5 CD’s, and the contract we had signed. I wanted to finish the Cranberries with the Cranberries.

Q: SO do you consider the project completely done?
D: It’s a possibility we will reunite, of course. The door is open. It hasn’t closed, who knows.

Q: The theme of death has always appeared in a lot of your songs, and now it’s present in your song “Black Widow”. How do you confront it?
D: “Black Widow” is a song about my mother in law’s death. She had cancer, and she fought with all sorts of treatments: chemotherapy, radiation…but everything made her worse. “Stay with me” is a song about cancer my father had. Fortunatley, he was able to get better, but the song is about the fear I felt about losing him. Music is very good therapy to deal with death. It’s a part of your life. Everyone is going to die, everyone around you. And in the end you have to try to move forward.

Q: Religion must help calm your fears, because you are a very religious person. At least from what we can tell with songs like “Angel fire” or “This is the day”
D: It’s good to have faith, to think there’s something after death, that we are going to a better place. Maybe we’ll find eachother in another place. It’s good that heaven exist. It would be horrible to think that one day you’ll be underground and that’s it…so I like to think there’s something else.

Q: Does your religion prohibit you from supporting gay marriage?
D: I don’t understand conventional/established religion. I don’t follow anyones established rules. It’s just that I have faith and I beleive in a greater spirit, & that’s it. If gay people want to get married, that’s very good. Everyone is happy.

Q: At one point you became a lesbian icon, given your androginy. Does that bother you given your religion?
D: It was just cos I had short hair. But why would it bother me? I think we should accept each other the way we are. Humans have to be able to love each other. Love can present itself in many different ways. If girls find me attractive I find that fantastic. And same thing if guys find me attractive.

Q: There are songs that seem to be inspired by your husband, and they sound very happy.
D: “Apple of my eye” is a very obvious one. It’s about loving someone, it’s very simple. I think it’s such a simple song that it’s very pretty.

Q: Part of Cranberries charm was that simplicity, but the critics never seem to understand that.
D: I have never cared what the critics thought about my lyrics being too simple. I think it’s always been a charm about the music that I do, and I think that’s why people like my songs.

Q: In this new record you worked with new producers like Dan Brodbeck and Youth. How did you find them?
D: Through Sanctuary. They suggested people for me to work with. Most of the disk belongs to Dan Brodbeck. Youth simply came to Canada and worked on a couple of songs one of them being “Ordinary Day”. It was great working with new people. I can’t find a word to describe all the ideas Dan brought in. It was a bunch of things.

Q: What music have you bene listening to lately?
D: I don’t listen to much music now, but I really like Snow Patrol and Coldplay. I don’t have a lot of time now to listen to music. I’m very busy.

Q: There are some metal songs in the album. Do you like metal?
D: Yes I like: Metallica, Aerosmith. I like Think Lizzy and Evanescence.

Q: You start your solo tour on May 29th in Barcelona. Do you hope to come back with a more extensive tour?
D: Right now there are 12 dates in Europe, and 15 in North America in June. I hope to come back to bigger places. It all depends on how the record does. It depends on a lot of things how my kids are doing, how the record is received, how everyone feels.

[Lyapis]

Dolores O'Riordan

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Dolores O'Riordan Interview
By Daniel Robert Epstein
"For the first time in my life, I didn't have the band waiting."

Dolores O'Riordan is best known as the vocalist for The Cranberries. After over a decade with that band, O'Riordan has finally decided to take the plunge with her own solo album, Are You Listening?. I got a chance to talk with O'Riordan as she was rehearsing to perform on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

UGO: Do you have a show tonight?

Dolores O'Riordan: Yeah, we're doing Jay Leno.

UGO: Cool. So you're there now.

Dolores: I'm here just walking around inside the building. We did Carson Daly yesterday.

UGO: It seems like each song on Are You Listening? had a very different inspiration. Is that true?

Dolores: That's right, yeah. I wrote the album over a four year period and it wasn't a conscientious thing. There was no structure on how it would be written or anything like that. It became a very a fluid, organic experience. I started to write as a hobby again, and that'd be the first time that I had that opportunity since before I joined The Cranberries as a teenager. It was because I just took a break from it all and I just went off and started this.

UGO: Did you know it was going to eventually be your first solo album?

Dolores: I didn't because, to me, life is so exciting and unpredictable so you never really know. You don't even know what you're going to be next year, but I never thought this album would happen. At the start, it seemed like such a big ambition. I thought I'd be able to write all the songs on my own, but I was quite used to having other people to bounce stuff off of. Then a couple of years into it, I'd written loads of stuff and I thought I should do a solo album. After a while, I had about 30 songs and we started shopping around.

UGO: So it was a very different process than writing with The Cranberries.

Dolores: Yeah, I found it to be a really different experience because, with The Cranberries, there was always a certain element of, "I knew they were waiting for me." But this is the first time in my life I didn't have to do it, so it was brilliant to have that feeling. I don't have to make music if I don't want to. Suddenly, you have no inhibitions and you write what you like. On the weekend I'd sit down, maybe when the kids were asleep, have a glass of wine and start playing with the piano. It became a very relaxing and therapeutic process.

UGO: Was the song "Ordinary Day" inspired by the birth of your daughter, Dakota?

Dolores: Yes, she's two years old now. When you're a mother and you look at your little girls sometimes, you have a flash where that could be yourself. They just remind you of when you were small. Back then, I was thinking, "Gosh, what if I really knew when I was four or five what lay ahead of me?" You'd love to make life just so perfect for them but you know that they have to go through challenges and the ups and downs of growing up.

UGO: What was different about the birth of Dakota from that of your other kids?

Dolores: The biggest difference was that for the first time in my life, I didn't have the band waiting. I didn't have to go back to rehearsals at three months or four months and break the nursing. I got to sit around a little bit longer and all I had to worry about was feeding the baby. That was quite nice, because with the other two children I did have The Cranberries waiting. Now, I could just enjoy and not worry about anything.

UGO: I know that your mother-in-law getting ill was what inspired the song "Black Widow." Was it your feelings about it or your husband's feelings?

Dolores: Just my feelings about it. It was really strange because I'd come across so many people who have encountered it in some form or other in their lives. Whether it would be a brother or sister or parent or whatever but I became aware of how absolutely devastating it is.

UGO: How did you end up collaborating with Graham Hopkins?

Dolores: I think I just met him in Dublin at a gig one night. I was looking for a drummer and I was asking around Dublin. But we ended up bumping into him and he started playing on my stuff. I love his drumming style. If you've got a good rocking drummer, it really makes a difference to your sound. We did a gig in London and we did eight songs and I think he broke six sticks. He must hit it pretty hard. Also, Marco Mendoza is an amazing bass player. He plays with Ted Nugent and Whitesnake, so he's from the rock school, but he's got a great technique.

UGO: I read that you collaborated with a producer named Youth. Is that true?

Dolores: Yeah. That was just before Christmas. I had pretty much recorded and written everything. Then, just before Christmas, the A&R guy who signed me suggested collaborating with Youth. So I collaborated with Youth on four tracks. We ended up using two on the album, "Apple" and "Ordinary Day." We also recorded a track which probably could be a B side.

UGO: This is a very stripped down album. How did that come about?

Dolores: I did the majority of the creative process of this record. I did half of it in my house on ProTools. When you're rehearsing with a band in a room, you don't really get to think that much. You don't get to sit back and really think, but with ProTools, you can put it down and then you can sit back and listen to it, then you can actually put it away for four days and pull it back out and listen to it again and hear it with fresh ears. So we did that a lot as well. I tried to keep it very fresh and I tried to listen to it with many different objectives.

UGO: I read that "Ordinary Day" is going to get a remix. What do you like about having your songs remixed?

Dolores: I just think it's all pretty cool, or whatever. People like to get up and do a bit of dance and shaking the booty. I find it interesting.

UGO: I read that you collaborated with Angelo Badalamenti not too long ago. I love his music. How was it working with him?

Dolores: He's fantastic. We did everything on ProTools over a three and a half year period and we only met each other this year in January. Technology is amazing. Angelo is fantastic to work with. It was a big dream of mine to work with him. I approached him and he was like, "Yeah, come on, let's do something." the stuff we did together I really love, because it's just really different. We did a song called "The Butterfly." I usually sent him a bunch of lyrics and then he sent me that music. Then I would lay down my voice or something and sent it back to him.

UGO: The Cranberries have taken a break but I heard that you were interested in doing something with them again.

Dolores: Not really. I haven't written off the idea of a reunion, but I couldn't see it being immediately, because I've really been really branching out and starting to have fun in a different way now. I want to experiment a little bit more for the next few years. After 16 years in a band, it became quite predictable. We'd do an album and then a tour then I had a baby and then we do another album and a tour and another baby. After so long, I wanted to do something different. Maybe we'll do a reunion tour in ten years.

UGO: How did you end up in the Adam Sandler movie Click last year?

Dolores: His people contacted my people and just asked me if I would come and do a cameo. I was pretty flattered because I really like Adam Sandler. I've always loved and admired his work and I find him very amusing. The first time I've ever seen him in a movie was The Wedding Singer. Then I got to play a wedding singer in his movie. It's funny.

UGO: What movies do you usually have on the tour bus?

Dolores: There's usually the Godfather Trilogy, Schindler's List and all those old classics.

UGO: That's some heavy stuff.

Dolores: Yeah, but the drivers have their own stuff.

UGO: But you're happy with Schindler's List and the Godfather movies.

Dolores: I watched them once and I wouldn't watch it again. I don't really like graphic visual violence. I'm not really big into the kung fu movies, either.