One Sunday afternoon in 1990, Dolores O’Riordan lugged her keyboard across Limerick, Ireland, for an audition. The 18-year-old only knew a few details about the rock band she would potentially be joining: They only wanted to play original songs and they were punnily named the Cranberry Saw Us (say it out loud).
For their part, the Cranberry Saw Us had not formed much of an identity beyond these details. The trio—drummer Fergal Lawler, guitarist Noel Hogan, and his bassist brother Mike—had grown up together in Limerick. As teens, they shared a love of breakdancing—Ireland had a robust breakdancing scene—and a fondness for the Smiths. The three had formed the Cranberry Saw Us about a year earlier but since their fourth member and frontman had departed, the band had been adrift. They had been searching for a female lead singer for months, but now that a slight, mousey candidate actually stood in front of them, they didn’t know what to make of her. However, when O’Riordan began to sing—her audition consisted of a few original tunes and a rendition of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy”—there was no question that they had found their new vocalist.
O’Riordan grew up about 10 miles outside Limerick in the rural townland of Ballybricken. The youngest of seven children, and one of two girls, O’Riordan learned early on that her voice would set herself apart: She was the precocious student that was asked to sing in Gaelic in front of the class, the tiny niece uncles brought around local pubs to entertain sloshed patrons. On her first day of secondary school, O’Riordan declared that she was going to be a rockstar before launching into a Patsy Cline song. She would go on to sing with a school choir that would frequently sweep the boards at Slogadh, an Irish youth arts festival. A devout Catholic, O’Riordan would later credit the church where she played the organ as the place that helped her envision music as a potential career. In 1992, she contextualized her band’s success as a kind of religious karma: “I could be just superstitious, but I think what’s happening now is a kind of a reward.”
After the audition, as O’Riordan headed out the door, the band handed her a tape with a loose sketch of a song—maybe she could think of some lyrics? The track consisted of four simple chords but, as O’Riordan remarked a few years later, “I took them home and I just wrote about me.” One week later she returned with a song that would change the foursome’s lives. Inspired by O’Riordan’s first kiss and the swift sting of rejection, “Linger” condenses every stage of heartache into four-and-a-half minutes of pop perfection with a few humble tools: an acoustic guitar riff, O’Riordan’s wistful humming, Lawler’s rolling drumbeat, and swooning orchestrals that aim for visions of grandeur far beyond the cheap synthesizer that produced them. The problem, as O’Riordan tells it, is that she gave her heart to someone, they stomped on it, and now she’s left holding the pieces. “But I’m in so deep/You know I’m such a fool for you/You got me wrapped around your finger,” she sings, her Irish brogue warming the edges of every syllable. All she wants is a little compassion moving forward: “Do you have to let it linger?”