WE’RE GONNA BRING THE QUARTET
WITH EACH GIG THE PROMOTERS ARE ORGANIZING A LOCAL STRING SECTION

 

Last Tuesday, Noel and Dolores were interviewed on the US radio SiriusXM on the show “Debatable”.
If you missed it, you can listen to it On Demand on the SiriusXM App. Only working if you are living in the US, for the rest of the world you can listen to the podcast by clicking THIS LINK.
A major thanks to Jackie Hogan who shared it on her Facebook.

Interesting interview which of course includes things already heard before but also a few fresh new anecdotes. It’s about 23 minutes long, a bit too long to summarize everything but here below some highlights:

Dolores: “There was this TV show called The Bachelorette, they asked us to do Linger with a quartet. Well I don’t watch the show, we didn’t know much about it but we said OK […] Linger sounded really nice and we said you know it’s our 25th anniversary maybe we should think doing an album for the fans and doing it with a quartet, that’s where the plan came from.”

Dolores: “It was exciting, the challenge of seeing how the songs might sound without all the electric guitars […] it came together very quickly, we went into a huge room and we tried to do it all live off the floor but the strings were leaking down the mics so we realized that we’d have to do the strings separately…”

Dolores: “They [the songs] kinda feel new this way, so different to the originals, like the originals will bring back the memory of that time at where we were when we were doing, but these new ones remind me now of this time”

Dolores: “with a quartet it’s quite different to the live set, we did a week of rehearsals 2 weeks ago in Ireland and the intros are different and some of the bridges are longer and stuffs like that, so that’s what we have to be very aware, because we’re bringing a quartet and a quartet are playing from a sheet […] you can’t afford to make any mistakes”

Dolores: “The guy who’s leading the quartet, he often looks over…”

Noel:  “A lot of our songs, it’s always a guitar base […] and some like Dreams, Ridiculous, they’ve always been very guitar heavy driven […] that was the challenge to kind of break them down without losing the songs completely […] and leaving enough space for the strings…”

Noel: “There’s 3 new songs, 2 of the songs were songs we had for a while…”

Dolores: “The Glory is about 6 months old, it’s very fresh, the other 2 Rupture and Why were written maybe 2 and a half years ago”

Dolores: “The Glory, the chorus came first, the chorus is quite positive and bright so I think it’s a song that has like optimism in it although there’s kind of sadness and nostalgia but there’s also optimism, so there’s a lot of different emotions going through that song”

Dolores: “I didn’t want people to think that this is the grande finale but we’re middle age now, so it’s something else that we’re bringing out but it’s not like a brand new album or new songs either but it’s ‘Something Else’ you know…”

Dolores: “Dreams did jump out to me […] it’s even more vulnerable than the original, so I was quite happy with that one, I think it sounds really nice, I was really impressed with it…”

Dolores: “I’m still very unsecure when it comes to writing […] I’ve always been played by self doubt and fear…”

Dolores: “We’re musicians, we go up on stage and we play music, and I sing, it makes me feel really good and that’s my thing…”

Dolores: “We’re gonna bring the quartet, with each gig the promoters are organizing a local string section, so the guy from the original quartet from UL (University of Limerick, Irish Chamber Orchestra location) he’s coming and they will have 3 other players sitting in, at each show it will be a different 3 players…”