Song of the day for January 15, 2024
Today’s song is by The Cranberries and it is a live version of them performing one of the bands biggest hits Zombie.
Irish musician and singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan from The Cranberries died on January 15, 2018, unexpectedly while she was in London, England, for a recording session. The Cranberries had the 1994 hit singles ‘Linger’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘Zombie’ and the bands 1993 album Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We spent a total of 86 weeks on the UK chart. She was in London getting ready to record her vocals on the Bad Wolves cover of Zombie.
After her death the band decided to release the song on January 18, 2018, without her vocal as a tribute. In June 2018, at a concert in New York City, Bad Wolves donated $250,000 to O’Riordan’s children.
The band’s singer Tommy Vext slightly altered the lyrics, inserting a reference to drones and replacing “since 1916” with “in 2018” to show that times haven’t changed. The band also added two extra stanzas to the end of the song which were not present in the original. However, Vext said that “we weren’t sure it if was going to make it onto the record. The song is a masterpiece and a massive hit. Some art is sacred—you become afraid to do a rendition of it”. On 21 December 2017, Vext met Dan Waite—the Internal managing director of Bad Wolves’ record label Eleven Seven Label Group-Europe and a long-time close friend of O’Riordan—backstage at London’s Wembley Arena at a heavy metal concert. Then he asked Waite to send her the cover for consideration as well as her approval for its release. Vext commented that “I just got the courage to ask him to send her the song to see if she would approve of it. It’s always a jarring thing to take on someone’s piece of work: especially as the Cranberries were a massive band, and ‘Zombie’ was probably their biggest song”. On Christmas Eve 2017, Waite sent a text message to Vext that said O’Riordan had offered to “sing on it” Vext described the situation: “it was a dream come true”, while the others musicians “almost didn’t believe it”
Bad Wolves released the cover on 18 January 2018 as the second single from their debut album Disobey. The cover was released without her vocals as a tribute
