Just found this short interview:
Dolores O'Riordan Rock 'N' Roll Mammy
Tuesday April 24, 2007 @ 04:30 PM
by Phil Villeneuve
Dolores O'Riordan is a very different woman from when most of the world knew her as the vocal and songwriting powerhouse in The Cranberries. When I ask her over the phone from her Canadian log cabin if she was comfortable and warm she replied, "Yes! I'm sitting here in a nice four-poster bed in my cottage with the heat and a warm blanket. I'm a sensible woman." Dolores O'Riordan Dolores O'Riordan A sensible woman, indeed. O'Riordan is now a mother of three, a wife to Duran Duran's tour manager (Canadian native Don Burton), and now, due to The Cranberries indefinite hiatus, she's a solo artist. Sporting long, jet black hair, O'Riordan is ready to tackle music on her own. Through depression, nervous breakdowns and a band desperately trying to keep it together, O'Riordan has been through a lot since auditioning for The Cranberries in 1990. And while the rock star title still suits her with new album Are You Listening? these days "mammy" is just as applicable. "Yeah, my kids love my music," O'Riordan gushes. "They don't really remember The Cranberries at all 'cause they were young, so they're finding out now, coming home from school and they're like, 'Mammy, are you like, in a band?' "But I play it down a lot. I'm just mammy to them and that's cool because you kind of wonder when they get to 16 and 17, will they be saying, 'Oh! You're cack.' So it's nice that they like it now, but we don't really play it too much around them because it's our work and we try to keep life very normal." O'Riordan seems to have fit well into normal life since leaving the band. She and her husband split their time between a farm in Dublin and the Ontario cottage. Now writing and composing on her own (though she still talks to the boys back home), O'Riordan views the world in a more optimistic light now. "I used to be quite pessimistic and negative around the third album when I had a nervous breakdown, which was a huge eye-opener," she explains. "When I recovered, through a long journey, I learned to find faith and hope and happiness and myself again. "Having the experience that I have now, I think I've also learned to look after myself a lot more as a woman. When I was younger, before you have children, your life is about your career and being the best instead of having fun and looking after yourself. Now when I look at my kids, I think 'God, to be able to have beautiful children and feed them and look at them grow!' There's a lot of hope and perspective now and I will always count my blessings and keep my focus." Even though O'Riordan has grown up, don't expect her newest baby to be an easy listening affair. AYL? still rocks pretty hard. Maybe not smothered-in-gold, flailing-in-front-of-a-crucifix, singing-about-zombies-hard, but rockin' nonetheless. "It's funny because when I started with this album I thought I would do a nice teary piano record and it started out that way and I wrote a couple of dark piano songs," O'Riordan says. "But then it just became really boring and dull to me and I said, 'You know what? It kind of needs to rock.' I just really enjoy the rocking bits and ended up incorporating a lot of guitar back into this album again. I suppose it's sort of part of my make-up now."
Source: chatattack.com
