Release: 04 May 2007
Label: Sanctuary Records / Sequel Records
Format: Cassette, CD, Digital downloads

TRACKLIST

1.     Ordinary Day (4:04)
2.     When We Were Young (3:23)
3.     In The Garden (4:27)
4.     Human Spirit (4:00)
5.     Loser (2:56)
6.     Stay With Me (4:01)
7.     Apple Of My Eye (4:42)
8.     Black Widow (4:56)
9.     October (4:38)
10.   Accept Things (4:11)
11.   Angel Fire (5:02)
12.   Ecstasy (5:13)

Japanese CD bonus tracks
13.   Letting Go (5:54)
14.   Forever (4:10)
15.   Sisterly Love (2:35)

International iTunes bonus tracks
13.   Willow Pattern (4:16)

RECORDING SESSIONS

• EMAC Recording Studios
  London, Ontario, Canada – date unknown

• Metalworks Studios
  Toronto, Ontario, Canada – date unknown, probably around 2003/2004
  Without You / Playground / Forever / Apple Of My Eye / Letting Go / In The Garden / Vadim’s Theme

• Pulse Studios
  Dublin, Ireland – date unknown, one week session, probably around 2005

• Windmill Lane Studios
  Dublin, Ireland – date unknown, probably around 2005/2006

• Studio unknown
  Los Angeles, California, USA – date unknown

• It is unclear on which session those songs were recorded:
  Ordinary Day / When We Were Young / Human Spirit / Loser / Stay With Me / Black Widow / October / Accept Things / Angel Fire / Ecstasy / Sisterly Love / Willow Pattern / Watch The Stars + 12 other tracks (unknown titles)

CREDIT INFORMATION

Dolores O’Riordan – Vocals
Steve Demarchi – Guitars
Marco Mendoza – Bass
Graham Hopkins – Drums

Music: all tracks written by Dolores O’Riordan
Lyrics: Dolores O’Riordan

Produced by Dolores O’Riordan & Dan Brodbeck except ‘Ordinary Day’ and ‘Apple Of My Eye’ produced by Youth, Dolores O’Riordan & Richard Chycki, and ‘Black Widow’ produced by Dolores O’Riordan and Matt Vaughan
Engineered by Clive Goddard & Richard Chycki except ‘Black Widow’ engineered by Stu Young, ‘October’ and ‘Angel Fire’ engineered by Richard Chycki, ‘When We Were Young’, ‘In The Garden’, ‘Human Spirit’, ‘Stay With Me’, ‘Accept Things’ and ‘Ecstasy’ engineered by Dan Brodbeck and ‘Loser’ engineered by Richard Chycki & Dan Brodbeck
Mixed by Richard Chycki
Mastered by Greg Calbi

Photography: Jonathan Glynn Smith
Art Direction & Design: Richard Bull at Yacht Associates

DOLORES O’RIORDAN’s SPECIAL THANKS

Firstly I would like to dedicate this album to Denise Burton who sadly died in the month of May 2004. Denise Burton – she’s a beautiful woman, I loved her too much.
I would also like to remember:
Mrs Moore (Gil Moore’s mother)
Mrs O’Rourke (Bernard O’Rourke’s mother).

But remembering, but living through the journey that is life. My daughter Dakota (which means friendly). She has inspired me to continue through the darkness, and only inspire brightness.

I want to thank all of you for being so patient with me because a true artist has to breathe. I would also like to thank my mother, Taylor, Molly, Donny my husband and my family for putting up with my absent mindness. They are the ones I truly love. They make me truly happy. Finally, I would like to apologize for my like of contact, and how I have isolated myself. But these are the only means where upon I can grow. I respect you and I love you, and I hope I will not let you down.

Here’s to 2007.

Matt Vaughan, wonderful man, wonderful experience. Dan Brodbeck, what can I say, mad in the head, brilliant producer, engineer and doing anything possible to make this album happen (did stupid ever make this album?). Gil Moore, the beautiful man I worked with for two songs as he bereaved his mother. Stu Youg, an amazing man that visited during my journey and brought so much “joie de vivre” into recording. Rich Chycki, who started to make sense out of the whole equation with his amazing touch for, recording and producing and also his eastern European demeaner.

Malcolm Dunbar: Sign Me – Frightened – Freaking out – What the fuck did I just do? Dolores: Sanctuary? – Why? – When? – What?

My Band: Graham Hopkins – “Kick Arse” – “Has issues”. Marco Mendoza – “Has Serious Issues”. Steve Demarchi – “Has Very Serious Issues”, Denny Demarchi – “Will Find Issues” Dolores O’Riordan – Issues “Lots of ’em” & Cries A Lot.

Very Special Thanks To:
Joe O’Herlihy, Murt Murphy, Sett Neiland, Bernard O’Rourke and everyone at Artwest. Lindsey Holmes and L.H.P, Tony English, Brian Caplan, Jay Syndyk, Paul Russell, Brian Curtin, Brian McLeod, Angelo Badelamenti, Aaron Murray, CAA Taylor Guitars, Gibson Guitars, Metal works, Phase One, Pulse, Windmill Lane, Litton Lane, Rob Jones. Sanctuary: Joe, Giles, Julian, Toby, Jennifer, Bob, Dan and everyone at the company.

NOTES

• Demos of “Letting Go” and “In The Garden” leaked on the Zombieguide forum in October 2006.
• These titles were recorded for Are You Listening?, but not used: “Playground”, “Watch The Stars” and 12 other unknown songs. “Vadim’s Theme” was released later on as “Angels Go To Heaven” on Evilenko’s OST.
• Dan Brodbeck, who produced and engineered Are You Listening, posted some photos of Dolores’s studio sessions on his personal site in 2006. The photos were taken at Pulse Studios and Windmill Lane Studios (where The Cranberries recorded To the Faithful Departed and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee), both in Dublin.
• In 2005 in an interview to Hot Press, Dolores explained the way the album was recorded: “I’ve just done a week’s worth of recording in Dublin’s Pulse Studios, which is the third or fourth session we’ve done […] Other bits of it were recorded in LA, and Metalworks in Toronto. I’d start the songs off at home on piano and then bring a programmer to the house to take care of the Pro-Tools side of things. Once I had three or four songs like that I’d go into a bigger studio with my musicians.”
• “Once the first 7 songs were penned, we went into the studio and had the musician’s record first. Then we took it from there. We didn’t rush it. In total, the writing and recording was a four-year period. The album was an awakening for me in my life – a journey that I completed. It’s like I crossed a bridge, which is a great new plateau to be on. My life is so different to how it was 10 years ago and there’s a great sense of acceptance. It’s a very exciting time to be releasing music again too. Song-writing is truly coming back.” June 13th, 2007
• “What happened was that I’d been in The Cranberries for fifteen years. A huge chunk of my life was taken up. It was a chapter of my life, or maybe even a few chapters. When I finished, the greatest hits came out. So, I left the band and I told them I was going to go on a journey where I was going to discover who I was without The Cranberries. I went off into the forest and went out there just being a person and a mother and a wife and a daughter for four years. I was trying to find out what I maybe would have lost over those years as a part of the rat race of being famous. I just wanted to experience real life, some grounding. I really enjoyed that grounding and songwriting started to become a hobby then. Then, I moved back to Ireland and the kids started to go to school and I got the album together.” (June 2007)
• “I was doing it as therapy. I wanted to switch off and be a human being, so I escaped from the industry and the whole entertainment side of things. For 14 or 15 years I’d always felt under pressure, because there was always another album to come, and another album then.” (The Independent, May 4^th 2007)
• “I just wrote. Basically, I took a break from the music and entertainment industry for the first time in my life, since I was 18. As you get older, you start having kids and what not, it slows down a little bit. After the greatest-hits record came out and things ended between [the Cranberries] and Universal, I figured that was the right time to switch off, get completely off the merry-go-round. I loved the whole idea of not being contractually bound; I kind of became myself again.” (Star Telegram, 2007)
• “Just that our personal lives kind of took over and it seemed kind of like the right thing to do, to kind of take a break. During that break I was enjoying it so much that it became a longer break and a longer break and so it became four years and I was just writing away on my time off myself, so I decided to kind of do the solo record then. It’s kind of been an experiment, I suppose.” (2007, Calgary Sun)
• According to numerous interviews O’Riordan gave in 2007, it seems she wrote more than 30 songs in the four years intervals, which led, after a selection, to the 12 tracks album. “It took me four years to make the album, the longest I’ve ever gone between albums, and that’s a good thing because I didn’t rush it and I picked the cream of the crop out of the 32 songs I wrote.”
• “It’s funny, I’ve gone full circle. When I started music was fun, a hobby, but after The Cranberries became so successful it stopped being fun…it wasn’t fun at all. And then I got busy with my family and it’s come back to being fun, a hobby, and that’s the best place for me to be to enjoy singing and what I’m doing.” (2007)
• “I wrote the album over a four year period and it wasn’t a conscientious thing. There was no structure on how it would be written or anything like that. It became a very a fluid, organic experience. I started to write as a hobby again, and that’d be the first time that I had that opportunity since before I joined The Cranberries as a teenager. It was because I just took a break from it all and I just went off and started this.[…] I didn’t [know it was going to be my first solo album] because, to me, life is so exciting and unpredictable so you never really know. You don’t even know what you’re going to be next year, but I never thought this album would happen. At the start, it seemed like such a big ambition. I thought I’d be able to write all the songs on my own, but I was quite used to having other people to bounce stuff off of. Then a couple of years into it, I’d written loads of stuff and I thought I should do a solo album. After a while, I had about 30 songs and we started shopping around. […] I found it to be a really different experience because, with The Cranberries, there was always a certain element of, “I knew they were waiting for me.” But this is the first time in my life I didn’t have to do it, so it was brilliant to have that feeling. I don’t have to make music if I don’t want to. Suddenly, you have no inhibitions and you write what you like. On the weekend I’d sit down, maybe when the kids were asleep, have a glass of wine and start playing with the piano. It became a very relaxing and therapeutic process.” (Dolores O’Riordan Interviewby Daniel Robert Epstein, 2007)