The Alternative Number Ones: The Cranberries’ “Salvation”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. As Scott explains here, the column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.

Dolores O'Riordan gave the last performance of her life at Stereogum's office Christmas party in 2017. This was before Scott Lapatine, our site's founder, bought the site back from its parent company and we went independent. At the time, Stereogum was owned by the same company that owned Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, SPIN, and Vibe. For the company's holiday party, they booked the cover band Saved By The '90s, and O'Riordan got up to sing three Cranberries songs with them. One month later, O'Riordan drowned in the bathtub of her London hotel room, probably after passing out from alcohol poisoning. She was 46, the same age that I am right now.

I don't know why I'm leading off with that anecdote. It's just the kind of thing that I can't keep to myself for very long, I guess. I wasn't at that Christmas party. It was in New York, and I don't live there. I came up to the city for a couple of staff Christmas parties back when we still had those, but not that one. In fact, I never saw O'Riordan live in any capacity. I just heard about that last performance from my co-workers on Slack afterwards. At the time, it was just a crazy story, like hearing that your boss' boss got shitfaced and barfed on a waiter's tray. As in: "Dolores O'Riordan sang at the party? The real Dolores O'Riordan?" When she passed away so soon afterward, it became just impossibly sad.

Look: There's nothing inherently wrong with a fading rock star taking a paycheck to play a private party. I'm sure it happens all the time. The Cranberries were still a band in 2017, and they could probably still draw some big crowds on the road. Eminem sampled "Zombie" on an album that came out the day after that Christmas party, so O'Riordan definitely wasn't broke. Maybe the party just seemed like a fun thing to do. I'm not retelling this story to make any kind of statement about a gifted artist's squalid, desperate last days. It's not sad that she played the party. It's just sad that she died.

So many of the great rock stars of the '90s didn't survive to see the decade's end. They became tragic icons, symbols of loss and of the impossible demands that we put on our idols. But a lot of the other great rock stars of the '90s survived into middle age, gradually became less famous, released music that wasn't as good as the music that made them famous, and then still died way too young. The demons that plagued their peers didn't spare these stars. They just made it to the point where they weren't really stars anymore. They were just people who died. In its own way, that's even sadder.

When the Cranberries' "Salvation," their second and final #1 hit, had its last week on top of the Billboard Modern Rock chart, it blocked Soundgarden from that spot. Soundgarden are the Creedence of the Modern Rock chart — three songs that peaked at #2, none that went all the way. ("Pretty Noose," the song that got stuck behind "Salvation," is a 7.) A few months before Dolores O'Riordan died, Soundgarden leader Chris Cornell took his own life at the age of 52. You would've thought, looking at him in his final days, that he'd conquered depression and become a chill, content middle-aged dad. You would've thought wrong.

O'Riordan's passing was like that, too. When the Cranberries were ultra-famous, she seemed to have a tough time with it. She wrote songs about how she hated the way that the press hounded her, and she lived a fairly private life whenever she could. She got famous when she was very young, and she never moved to London or LA. Instead, she stayed first in Ireland and then in Ontario, where her husband was from. She got married, had three kids, and got divorced after 20 years, the way people sometimes do. She went through periods of depression and anorexia, the way people sometimes do.

After her marriage ended, O'Riordan went through an especially difficult period. She moved to New York, finally. She got arrested for stomping on a flight attendant's foot and headbutting a cop during a trans-Atlantic flight. She attempted suicide, not for the first time. And then she died. It just fucking bums me out, is all. Sometime in the last year, my daughter discovered the Cranberries. She really only listens to five or six Cranberries songs, but she listens to them all the time. I would love to take her to a Cranberries show, and I can't do that because Dolores O'Riordan is dead, and the last time that she ever performed was at my office Christmas party. It pisses me off. O'Riordan deserved better, and so did everyone else.

"Salvation," the Cranberries' second and final #1 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, is an anti-drug song. I'm not saying that to be flippant or ironic or to draw some line between that and the way O'Riordan died. That's just what it is. "Salvation" is not one of the best things that the Cranberries ever made, and it's not one of the five or six songs that my daughter plays in the car. The Cranberries were already beginning their long career descent when the song came out, and it's a little more thin and lifeless than the stuff that they made when they were on top. It's still pretty good, and it's mostly pretty good specifically because of Dolores O'Riordan.

It seemed like the Cranberries had already evaded the sophomore slump. Just as jangly college-rock was giving way to grunge, the Cranberries came in with their 1993 debut Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, a surprise smash that yielded a couple of huge songs and achieved commercial feats that obvious influences like the Smiths and the Sundays could never touch. It went platinum five times. A little more than a year later, they released the sincere, searching sophomore joint No Need To Argue and went harder than they'd ever gone on the grunge-adjacent lead single "Zombie." That song was huge, and the album went platinum seven times. The Cranberreis were well-positioned to become commercial standbys, career artists. But that's not what happened.

After recording their first two albums with Smiths/Blur collaborator Stephen Street, the Cranberries went off to Canada and recorded 1996's To The Faithful Departed with hard rock mega-producer Bruce Fairbairn. This was a curious decision. Stephen Street was clearly happy to help them go wherever they wanted musically. Fairbairn had never really worked with a band like the Cranberries. I can't find any interviews where they talked about why they went with this guy. Maybe they just wanted to keep making hits, and Fairbairn made plenty of hits.

Fairbairn got his start working with AOR chart-smashers Loverboy in the early '80s, but his big calling card was Bon Jovi's 1986 blockbuster Slippery When Wet. (Fairbairn's work has never appeared in this column before, but he's been in the mainline Number Ones for a bunch of Bon Jovi tracks.) Fairbairn worked with Aerosmith all through their titanic comeback in the late '80s and early '90s, and he did records like AC/DC's The Razor's Edge and Poison's Flesh And Blood. He was not an alternative rock guy, is what I'm saying. Shortly after producing To The Faithful Departed, Fairbairn did the INXS comeback attempt Elegantly Wasted. I guess that could be considered an alternative rock album, but it turned out even worse than To The Faithful Departed.

To The Faithful Departed is way thinner, more indulgent, and less focused than the two previous Cranberries albums, and it doesn't have the same sonic heft. That's not entirely Bruce Fairbairn's fault. The Cranberries earned plenty of blame, and O'Riordan's lyrics were probably the biggest issue. Her heart was in the right place. She wanted to write serious, weighty songs about serious, weighty things, and the universe had already proven that she could do that. "Zombie" was about the innocent victims of the armed struggle between Irish republican forces and British loyalists, and she turned it into a stadium-sized mega-singalong. Who's to say she couldn't do that again? That, I think, is how we ended up with songs like "Bosnia," and nobody needs songs like "Bosnia."

To The Faithful Departed opens with a song called "Hollywood," in which O'Riordan sings that "the greatest irony of all" is that the place is "not so glamorous at all." On "I Shot John Lennon," she helpfully describes Lennon's murder as "a sad and sorry and sickening sight." On "I'm Still Remembering," she hits us with this: "What of Kurt Cobain? Will his presence remain? Remember JFK, ever saintly in a way!" In a great SPIN review, Charles Aaron described the self-explanatory ballad "War Child" as "a maudlin spotlight moment you’d expect at a school assembly from the youth choir’s biggest butt-kisser." I'm not going to try to compete with that.

Rock critics love to rag on lines like those. As you can see, I am nowhere near immune to that tendency. Those lyrics are cloying and obvious and embarrassing. You can see why someone might write lyrics like that. If you've suddenly become globally famous and super-visible, you might want to use your platform to make the world better in whatever small ways you can. You might feel a responsibility to do that. Plenty of rock stars have done that in ways that are serious and artful and smart and sincere, but it's not an easy thing to do. Way more often, people's attempts at important rock songs clang off the rim.

To the extent that she gets away with this stuff on To The Faithful Departed, Dolores O'Riordan gets away with it because she's got that voice. The accent is part of it. I can't act like the accent isn't part of it. If enough of my ancestors stayed put, I might've had that accent instead of the rumbling Baltimore honk that is my actual birthright. I like my voice just fine, but there are certain accents where you can order a pizza and sound like you're singing a beautiful song, and Dolores O'Riordan had one of those. But beyond the accent, O'Riordan had a gale-force yodel-yowl that could convey trembling fury just as clearly as swooning despair. I don't know if O'Riordan could've sung "Walking On Sunshine," but that was never her métier. She was just right for the frantic determination of "Salvation."

So. "Salvation." Anti-drug song. "Salvation, salvation, salvation is free." That's the chorus. The message is literally "don't do drugs." As in: "Don't do it, don't do it!" That's what O'Riordan sings to the people "doing lines" and the people with "heroin eyes." It would be so nice if addiction was that simple. Back in 1996, the "just say no" thing was still plenty prevalent. Maybe that's not how O'Riordan and her bandmate and co-writer Noel Hogan intended the song, but that's how it comes off.

O'Riordan certainly knew that things weren't quite that easy. In an MTV News piece that I keep seeing quoted online but can't find directly, she apparently said that she'd dealt with addiction herself: "It wasn’t a nice experience, and it didn’t get me anywhere. It just confused me more." She also reportedly said that the song wasn't "anti-drug" but that it was against the idea of anything else controlling you. So maybe it's a protest song, except that the things she's protesting are her own urges. On the bridge, however, she counsels parents of addicted kids to "tie your kids home to their beds, clean their heads." Again: Not so simple!

Time can have a funny effect on direct, linear lyrics like those. Sometimes, the stuff that I once found stupid grows to become endearing. That's how I feel about Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," which peaked at #2 in 1995. (It's a 10.) But there are plenty of other songs where the lyrics never stop tripping me up. "Salvation" is one of those. The lyrics don't torpedo the song. I just wish they were better or, failing that, easier to ignore.

The music, though? Pretty good! Dolores O'Riordan and Noel Hogan wrote most of the songs from To The Faithful Departed during soundchecks during their endless global tours. On "Salvation," you can tell that they were going for the some driving grandeur that they found on "Zombie." The song never reaches those heights, partly because it doesn't really have a chorus, though I do really like the "uh hah-ah" chant that O'Riordan does after she wails that salvation, salvation, salvation is free. But the song is short and fast and bruising, and it gets the job done.

If O'Riordan's lyrics are the worst thing about "Salvation," her voice is obviously the best. As always, she leans hard into that accent, and it makes her pedestrian words feel bigger and more meaningful than they actually are. The band churns with focused but workmanlike intensity. The bass gestures in the direction of griminess without ever fully burying itself in the mud, and you can hear just a hint of jangle in the guitars if you squint your ears hard enough. The most obvious Bruce Fairbairn touch is the cluster of ultra-processed electronic drum hits during the little breaks. That sounds like some Def Leppard shit. I love Def Leppard shit, but it doesn't really belong on a Cranberries song.

Fairbairn also played the trumpet that might be the most divisive part of "Salvation." I've seen plenty of critics, both at the time and since then, use the term "ska-punk" to describe the "Salvation" trumpet. Well, "Salvation" isn't a ska-punk song at all. It's not even really a punk song. (This might be a good place to note that Rancid reached #21 with an unrelated but way better song called "Salvation" a year and a half earlier. They're some raaaaats, out on a mission! They're in your front yard, under suspicion!) A few staccato trumpet stabs don't suddenly turn a song into ska-punk. But ska-punk was becoming more of an alt-rock radio presence when the Cranberries dropped their "Salvation," and that trumpet part would've worked just fine on a Reel Big Fish song. As a teenager who was getting really into ska-punk in that moment, I thought it sounded cool. I still do.

"Salvation" isn't an immortal Cranberries song, but I like it as an energetic hector. I think this is one of those cases where a powerful singer can elevate a fairly average song by delivering it with conviction. I don't remember ever being excited when "Salvation" arrived on the radio, but I don't remember turning it off, either. That's a testament to O'Riordan's flaming sword of a voice. Most of her peers couldn't have pulled it off.

Lots of people seem to have strong memories surrounding the "Salvation" video, or at least toward its villain, a horror-movie clown with needles instead of hair. The Cranberries filmed it in France with Olivier Dahan, who would later direct Marion Cotillard to an Oscar for La Vie En Rose. Even at the time, I thought the scary-clown stuff was trite, and so was the idea that it represented the evils of drug abuse. The clip also has that ultra-'90s yellow tint that immediately felt dated. But Dolores O'Riordan did make an impression on me, flashing furious eyes and twitching her hips at the camera. She looked cool as hell.

The Cranberries released To The Faithful Departed in April 1996, and they immediately headed out on another endless global tour. In the US, the album debuted at #4, higher than any Cranberries album had previously gone. "Salvation" got lots of spins on modern rock stations but never really crossed over. Critics didn't like it. The band ended up canceling many of their tour dates because of O'Riordan's exhaustion, but they still made it over here to perform "Salvation" at the VMAs. They played right before Oasis, who seemingly did not heed the song's message about doing lines. O'Riordan looked crazy.

The Cranberries followed "Salvation" with "Free To Decide," where O'Riordan wails that's she's "not so suicidal after all," despite the best efforts of the press. There's another real lyrical clanker on that song: "You must have nothing more with your time to do/ There's a war in Russia and Sarajevo, too." But that song is pretty good, too, which is once again almost entirely because of what O'Riordan did with that voice. "Free To Decide" reached #8, and it was the Cranberries' last top-10 hit on the Modern Rock charts. (It's a 7.) To The Faithful Departed ultimately went double platinum, which is nowhere near what the Cranberries sold with their first two records.

The Cranberries took a bit of a break after the To The Faithful Departed album cycle wound down. They came back with 1999's Bury The Hatchet, which has some dog-ass ugly cover art. It's the one with the giant floating eye looking down at the crouching naked person in the desert landscape. I don't know what was going on there. That album continued the diminishing returns. It stalled out at gold, and lead single "Promises," which I'm not sure I've ever heard before today, peaked at #12. That was the band's last song ever to reach the Modern Rock charts. It's not bad.

The Cranberries reunited with producer Stephen Street for their 2001 album Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, and they split from MCA shortly after it tanked. The band went on hiatus after that, and Dolores O'Riordan released two '00s solo albums that didn't really go anywhere. Then the band got back together and released a couple more albums, and they didn't really go anywhere, either. Their final LP, at least before the posthumous 2019 record In The End, was mostly acoustic orchestral re-recordings of their old songs. O'Riordan also put out a 2016 record with D.A.R.K., a side-project band with the late Smiths bassist Andy Rourke.

The Cranberries were one of the great commercial alt-rock forces of the great commercial alt-rock boom. Their time on top was short, but they left a lasting impression. The handful of truly great songs from the first two Cranberries albums will continue giving people terrible problems at karaoke until the sun consumes the earth. That's their real legacy. A pretty-good late-period hit like "Salvation" doesn't really move that legacy in any direction, and it doesn't need to. It's just too bad O'Riordan couldn't stick around to see a few more generations discover the really great, era-defining songs that she left behind.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: You might not be surprised to discover that "Salvation" gets a lot of love in the world of straight-edge hardcore. Here, for instance, is the version of "Salvation" that the influential metalcore band Prayer For Cleansing released in 2004:

And here's a video of the tireless present-day hardcore cult heroes Haywire covering "Salvation" at a 2024 Brooklyn show: