Dolores O’Riordan died yesterday. The lead singer of The Cranberries was a year younger than I am.
After the shock of yesterday’s news wore off, I checked Twitter and found solace in the fact that many, many people were touched by this band and its singer. I read a few pieces on music websites and then listened to most of the band’s first two albums, which I carry around in my iPod.
There’s a reason this particular band and this particular singer hold a special place in my heart and mind. When “Dreams,” the first single from the band’s debut album, initially hit MTV and college radio, I was obsessed with the song and the band. This happened in spring 1993 at the exact same time I was getting to know the woman who would become my wife. In fact, she also was a Cranberries fan, and that was one of our first common interests.
By September of that year, I took her to The Cranberries’ first concert in Portland—a date that neither of us admitted was a date until years later. The shirt pictured with this post is from that show. Four years later, my wife and I played at least one Cranberries song at our wedding reception. The band was “our band.”
Upon hearing the sad news yesterday, in addition to thinking about that personal history, I pondered the different ways I’ve reacted to the deaths of musicians who’ve meant something to me. So many of my musical heroes are gone—Joe Strummer, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, most of the Ramones, Freddie Mercury, to name just a few. But it all leads back to Kurt Cobain.
I was 23 years old in April 1994. I had been a reporter for the weekly Siuslaw News, my first job out of college, for about 10 months. I’d been born near Los Angeles and was living on the Oregon Coast, but my pride in growing up near Seattle still ran strong. In high school, I had heard the early grunge bands played on KCMU (now KEXP), and it was thrilling to see one of those homegrown bands hit it big … really big. And then, of course, was the music. Nirvana wove together strains from influences that I liked and made them sound like almost nothing else out there in the early 1990s.
And then Kurt died. As predictable as it seemed after all the public warning signs, it somewhat still was a shock. I looked up what I wrote back then and I said even then that Kurt’s death felt “different” than that of other celebrities. Maybe because he was the Washington state kid who conquered the world, or because I connected to his music so intensely, or just because I was in my 20s, when everything seems important.
From the mid-1990s until just a couple of years ago, I couldn’t listen to Nirvana more than a song or two at a time. It was too shrouded in sadness for me. It wasn’t the same with The Clash when Joe Strummer died; I’d been listening to that band since I was 12 or so, and his death didn’t change that. Same with the Ramones and, more recently, Bowie.
Leonard Cohen’s death in late 2016 hit me hard, possibly because it came as I prepared for my aunt’s funeral, but not in the same way as Kurt’s. Cohen was 82, not 27. While he still was making music nearly up to the day he died, Cohen had been around for nearly 50 years. He had a long, spectacular career. Since his death, I’ve listened to more of his music, not less.
Back to Dolores. She was 46. While she recently announced she was bipolar, her death came out of nowhere.
Her death seems like another nail in the coffin of who I was 25 years ago, as well as the entire decade of the 1990s in general. The ‘90s were the decade of my 20s, the decade I met and married my wife, the decade when we first ventured out into the post-college world. It was before 9/11. It felt simpler and more innocent back then.
But time moves on, and we’re reminded of that when present-day events write add epilogues to the dearly held memories of an earlier era. As Dolores once sang, “Time is ticking out.”