Delores O'Riordan

Delores O'Riordan was the lead singer of the Cranberries.  She was found dead this weekend at the age of 46.

There are two different decades where I thought music exploded with creativity and innovation.  The 60s was a decade that established the roots of all music today.  But the 90s took all music and threw it into a blender, and some great things came out of it.

The seeds of "alternative" music started in the mid 80s.  I started my freshman year of college at U.H. and soon after joined a band.  Whereas in high school I was playing a lot of the metal that was mainstream and popular (Ratt, Motley Crue, etc.), my second college band found me playing R.E.M., The Cult, The Clash, INXS, The Church, etc. (oddly, the metal / shred image that people associated with me was still there, as the band insisted on doing a Joe Satriani song, presumably to keep my interest).

In those early alternative / college songs, I saw that there was less an emphasis on being mainstream as a lot of so-called metal bands had begun to have a uniform look / style, in the generic bullshit bands like Warrant and Firehouse.  There was no "rock" in those bands, whereas there was just something more raw in a song like "Radio Free Europe" or "Waitress In The Sky" (The Replacements "Tim" was a life-changing album for me).

The early 90s saw that explode into the mainstream when Nirvana broke and relegated the corporate glam metal bands' CDs to the budget bins, where they should have gone from the start (side note:  apologies to Extreme, who was led by one of my favorite guitarists of all time, Nuno Bettencourt).

I thought the 90s were so incredible, and I would listen to Radio Free Hawaii daily, hearing everything from grunge, to ska and punk, to rap metal and thrash, and female led bands like the Indians and the Cranberries that paved the way for artists like Jewel, Sarah McLachlin and Alanis Morissette.

The Cranberries were an essential band of that era.  They wrote some amazing songs like Linger, Dreams and Zombie.

In 2017, they released "Something Else", which had acoustic versions of their songs.  I love the instrumentation, which supports the songs in a different yet fitting way.

Delores's voice was sweet, and you could hear a hint of her Irish accent in her singing.  That gave the songs an exotic feel to me.  She was such a talented singer with a unique voice and gift for writing beautiful melodies.  I'll be listening to the Cranberries today.