Twenty-one. That was the age I was when I went to hear The Cranberries on their first U.S. tour in the summer of '93, in the basement music joint of a bar/restaurant in St. Louis. Five or so of us crammed into a large 80's-era Buick and made our way from Springfield, Missouri to hear this new band we were all so crazed about. It was also the summer I met my husband, Nalin. We had met a few weeks earlier through a mutual friend and found ourselves with similar interests in books, music, you name it. Although he had only been in the country around six months, he had already been to St. Louis, a 3-hour drive away, several times in search of Indian food, movies, or spices — and was anxious to go again. So here we were standing a few feet from one another in this small, dim basement with the lilting, mezzo-soprano voice with unique cracks and even a few yodel-styled high notes of Dolores O'Riordan compelling us forward. She was twenty-one then as well, which I never realized until today, 25 years later... hearing that she died at the age of 46, the very age I am today. Just like she writes in her song, "Sunday," she mystified us in a way that was hard to explain. Sure, you could say that it was my "summer of love," that nearly anything would seem mystical then. But she was a force. And she was a sprite. A Shakespeare's honest Puck of sorts in form, except that even with her songs of protest she did not offend, and her existence was surely no dream. The power in her voice could go up against the best of them, including another great Irish export, U2's Bono, a singer of solid import to us all at that time as well.
Today I sit here in my cozy home in Chicago, with the fire stoked and the snow falling, home with Nalin and the kids and listening to her music on this day of remembrance — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — and the news of her death brings me back to these early years of mine, when my conscious was forming in utterly significant ways, weaving through the days and months of my imminent adulthood, newly graduated from college. I have told people in the past that there could be no better soundtrack to a budding romance than "Everyone Else is Doing it So Why Can't We?," with tracks like Linger, Dreams, Sunday. I still recall staring at Nalin that night from a few feet away as he sipped his martini and felt the ache of curiosity mixed with desire. And yet the rawness and power of her voice spoke to something deeper than melodies to young lovers. She sang with searing truth the brutality of occupation and strife in Northern Ireland through latter protest songs like "Zombie" in their second album. You see, these few years of my late teens and early twenties saw the IRA announce a ceasefire after 25 years of conflict, it saw the negotiations to end Apartheid in South Africa between 1990 and 1993, it saw the the Gulf War, it saw the end of the Cold War and the toppling of the Berlin Wall, it saw the war in Rwanda, it saw the ramping up of the Bosnian War. And in our own country, we were still seeing countless die from AIDS and the aftermath of Rodney King's beating. The list goes on and on. There is no doubt that so much of the music I listened to in those days awakened my senses to the rest of the world. What was happening made all of us early Gen-X'ers want to, as Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, "sound [our] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." And who did it better than Ms. O'Riordan.
RIP