To The Faithful Departed

The Cranberries lead singer Delores O'Riordan

As a kid growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, I remember a big part of Sunday mornings in our family's home was seeing parts of the thick Sunday edition of the Washington Post spread about the house.

I can still smell the distinctive aroma of the newspaper as I paged through the comics section, and after Peanuts, the next cartoon I read was Beetle Bailey - it always put a smile on my face.

So it was sad to wake up this morning and read that cartoonist Mort Walker died on Saturday at aged 94.

He wasn't the only creative icon to pass in the past couple weeks, last Tuesday, Delores Mary Eileen O'Riordan, lead singer of the Irish alternative-pop group the Cranberries, was laid to rest in her home town of Ballybricken, Ireland near Limerick in a grave next to her father's.

The funeral, which appropriately featured recordings of her singing, took place in the modest parish church of St. Ailbe, the same place where O'Riordan sang in the choir and also played organ as a young girl.

If you happen to be a fan of O'Riordan as I am, and are interested, Miriam Lord wrote a very touching first-person account of the funeral in The Irish Times on Tuesday.

So in a very real sense, she was laid to rest in the same place where she started - there's something poetic and beautiful in that given her rise to global fame and the many countries she visited while touring with the Cranberries during the course of her music career.

Delores O'Riordan's unexpected death in a hotel room in London two weeks ago on January 15th at the age of 46 came as a real shocker to me as it happened on the same day that I happened to be down in Pennsylvania for the funeral of my friend Shawn's mother.

In fact I first heard the news about O'Riordan's death on the radio while I was on I-295 north driving back from the funeral with a friend - there was something disorienting about learning about the death of an artist I admired and whose presence I took for granted just as I was grieving the loss of a friend's mother who was such a part of the landscape of my high school years.

The Cranberries in Limerick, Ireland in 1993 just
before their rise to the pinnacle of their success 

Having lost my father to cancer when I was 28-years-old, I know from personal experience that one of the most difficult aspects of grief is trying to mentally process the simple fact that the person who was once a part of the fabric of your life has physically departed the reality in which you live.

For months, even years after my father's death, there were mornings when I woke up and thought to myself:

Is he really gone? Or was that just a dream and he's going to walk in the door any minute?


During my life I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of famous people I admired in person, but while I never had the chance to meet Delores O'Riordan or the other members of the Cranberries, I always felt like their music, in particular her voice, held a particular resonance for me.

She was an artist whose creative talent and efforts loomed large during an important period of my life; one who, at various times, inspired, comforted, uplifted and entertained me.

Like millions of other fans of the Cranberries, whose members include guitarist Noel Hogan (pictured above left), his brother bassist Mike Hogan (above right), and drummer Fergal Lawler (above center), my first experience hearing Delores O'Riordan's distinctive voice was the band's early huge hit "Linger".

The ethereal strings and introspective melodies combined with O'Riordan's powerful and haunting singing on "Linger" and their other early hit "Dreams" propelled their first album "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Cant' We?" to massive popular and critical success - and helped define the distinctive sound that would help the Cranberries sell over 40 millions albums.

In late 1994 as the Cranberries were at the peak of their success, they released their second hit album "No Need To Argue" which topped their previous album in sales and produced the hit single that really propelled them into the stratosphere in terms of popularity - "Zombie".

3-YO Jonathan Ball (left) and 12 YO Tim Parry:
victims of the IRA bombing in Warrington in 1993

While I owned and was a huge fan of their first album, for me personally, "No Need To Argue" is the album that really connected me with the Cranberries on a deeper level.

It came at a time of transition in my own life after I'd been released by the New York Giants at the end of training camp in August of 1994 and made the difficult decision to end my football career and was beginning to express myself artistically and politically; and spending time thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.

"No Need To Argue" represented a distinctively heavier turn for the band, both in terms of lyrical subject matter and sound, and Delores O'Riordan wrote the lyrics and chords for the 4th song on the album, "Zombie", in her apartment to channel her outrage over the senseless deaths of 3-year-old Jonathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry (pictured above).

The two boys were both killed after the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated two bombs hidden inside separate trash bins along Bridge Street in a crowded shopping area in downtown Warrington, England on March 20, 1993.

Another 54 people were injured and a 32-year-old mother of two named Bronwen Vickers who lost a leg in the bombing died of cancer 12 months later.

According to Wikipedia's article on the Warrington bombing, 3-year-old Jonathan Ball had been in the area with his babysitter shopping for a Mother's Day card for his mom when he was killed.

Tim Parry's parents Colin and Wendy made the difficult decision to take their son off of life support in the hospital five days later after doctors determined there was no meaningful brain activity.

Tim Parry's father Colin speaking in public

The bombing sparked massive protests in Dublin, Ireland against the IRA and while the perpetrators were never caught, Colin and Wendy Parry became advocates for non-violence and started a charity called the Tim Parry Jonathan Ball Peace Foundation to promote peaceful strategies and education for conflict resolution amongst young people internationally.

At the time that the song "Zombie" came out, like many others I had no idea what the lyrics were specifically about.

In fact, Colin Parry himself said in a BBC article two weeks ago that he had no idea the song was about the death of his son Tim and Jonathan Ball until hearing about it in the wake of Delores O'Riordan's death.

In America in 1994, a lot of popular music was being defined by the heavier guitar-driven sound that defined the Grunge movement (bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Smashing Pumpkins etc.) and that sound was influencing my own guitar playing.

With "Zombie", the Cranberries demonstrated an ability to tap into that sound and mold it to their own distinctive style in a way that showed how they'd matured as musicians and as artists in terms of their willingness to begin to explore darker politically-sensitive themes in their lyrics like terrorism, war and loss.

Cover of the Cranberries' 3rd album

At the time I was playing a lot of electric guitar and I learned to play and sing both "Zombie" and "Empty" from the Cranberries' 2nd album "No Need To Argue" because I was drawn to the contrast of "Zombie's" soft introductory chord progressions and the relatively soft verses overlaid with acoustic guitar progressions, against the heavy distorted chords, pounding base and intense drums of the chorus.

The song got a lot of play on MTV at the time and I was also drawn to the imagery of the video with it's political themes on the conflict in Northern Ireland even though I didn't know the lyrics and song were about the Warrington bombing - the video has gotten over 610 million views on Youtube.


But it was the Cranberries' third album "To The Faithful Departed" that was the most personal for me.

After struggling with cancer throughout 1995, my father died on June 24, 1996, the same year the Cranberries released "To The Faithful Departed".

The band continued their embrace of the heavier guitar sounds, particularly on songs like "Hollywood", "Salvation", "The Rebels", "Electric Blue" and "Bosnia".

The band's musical sound, and Dolores O'Riordan's voice, along with the musical production value, continued to mature on this album.

And the lyrics explored a range of topics including war, reproductive choice, disillusionment with fame, war - and of course loss.

But the songs also explore fond remembrances of people (and times) past with a sense of love and joy; and while I never learned to play any of the songs off this album, I can say without a doubt that it helped me process the grief I was experiencing from the loss of my father.

Mourners carry Delores O'Riordan's coffin from
the St. Ailbe Church Tuesday January 23rd.

I've always found the ballad "When You're Gone" a poignant and touching mediation on love and loss.
  
The album dedication notes penned by Delores O'Riordan have always been something I go back and periodically read and reflect on because I'll always remember how the words helped me in a time of personal grief.

And to me, they now serve as something of a requiem to her now that she herself has sadly gone.

"To the Faithful Departed: This album is dedicated to all those who have gone before us. Nobody knows exactly where these people are but I know we would like to believe it is a better place. 

I believe it is a human impossibility to obtain complete peace of mind in this dimension, there's too much suffering and pain particularly for children. 'Suffer the little children to come unto me, for their's is the kingdom of heaven.' 

To the faithful departed and those left behind, there is a light that never dies" 

- Delores O'Riordan