Music Nostalgia: Adolescence and the Cranberries
When I was as a teenager I use to listen to music to go to sleep, I had a radio next to my bed stand. This was the only way to get me to sleep at night for years until I went to college. I had a habit of listening to the 80’s, 90’s, and now. It was one spring night when I was 15 years old, I heard “Dreams” by the Cranberries. I was taken away by Dolores O’Riordans’ angelic and haunting voice, it was something I’ve never heard before. Her music gave me a sense of hope.
At this time in my life (2012), I was a depressed teenager and was about to enter in high school. But the Cranberries somehow sent messages of love and self-love, their rhythms were upbeat and romantic. It gave me a vision of my future living in Atlanta as a successful, happy grown-up woman. O’Riordan taught me how to love myself with her lyrics to Linger. Yes, it’s a song about how she was led on by a man she was dating; but the melody of it is so beautifully done and upbeat. It gave me motivation to love myself again without a care in the world. I listened to it everyday throughout my high school career.
Fast forward six years later (2018), I’m in my sophomore year of college and have just decided to pursue a pathway of suicide prevention counseling due to a close friend’s death. I log on to YouTube and find an ABC news video that announced that Dolores O’Riordan has passed away. Because her death and my friend’s death that weren’t far apart, whenever I would listen to the Cranberries I would think of the life and death of my friend and any memories I had of her. Sometimes I needed to listen to it, but I had forgot the purpose of why I listened to it in the first place. The reason I listened to it all those years is it because of it reminded me of growing up, my hometown, and the love I have for myself.
But it had become about my friend and my friendship with her, so thus it had become painful to listen to. There was a period of time where I completely stopped listening to the Cranberries as I wanted to avoid the emotions associated with my friend’s passing. I started working through my grief and forgiving my friend, therefore started healing and moving forward in life. Just recently, I was able to listen to “Linger” without having memories of my friend and remembered the good moments in my adolescence once again. The nostalgia once again had returned and now I’m exploring other songs by the artist; each song helps me look at the positives in what I considered a “hard period” in life.
