Deep Cut Friday: ‘Daffodil Lament’ by the Cranberries

Singer and guitarist Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries performs on stage in 1995. (Credit: Pete Still/Redferns)

Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.

The Cranberries’ 1994 album No Need to Argue is their most popular release, selling seven million copies in the U.S. alone. And it’s been expanded multiple times with the addition of demos, remixes, and live tracks for a 25th anniversary reissue in 2020 and, again in August, for the 30th anniversary “super deluxe” edition. The latest version of the album runs nearly three hours and includes the first commercial release of three songs from the Irish band’s set at Woodstock ’94, including the epic “Daffodil Lament.”

After rising to fame with jangly songs such as “Linger” that earned them frequent comparisons to dream pop bands like the Sundays, the Cranberries toured heavily in support of their 1993 debut Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? When the road-tested quartet returned to the studio with producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur), they were ready to try new things. That most famously resulted in the hard rocking protest song “Zombie.” And the album’s six-minute penultimate track “Daffodil Lament” expanded the Cranberries sound in another direction, moving away from pop song structures for something more complex and linear. 

Singer-guitarist Dolores O’Riordan spoke about the genesis of “Daffodil Lament” in a 1995 conversation with journalist (and SPIN contributor) Evelyn McDonnell for Interview Magazine. “It was kind of weird, I had all these ideas about tempos changing and things stopping and starting, like a symphony or something, going into different phases and different tunes,” O’Riordan said. “I think musically everybody got more adventurous and experimental.”

Early in the days of mainstream artists beginning to use the internet to interact with and gather the opinions of the public, the Cranberries’ official website polled fans on the band’s most popular non-single in 2002 for inclusion on the band’s first greatest hits compilation. “Daffodil Lament” won the poll in a landslide and was a bonus track on Stars: The Best of 1992-2002.

Three more essential Cranberries deep album cuts:

“Wanted”

“Wanted” is the shortest song on Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? but a memorable one that showed the band’s post-punk roots a little more than the album’s singles. It was also the album track that the Cranberries performed as often as their hits throughout the band’s three decades together.

“Forever Yellow Skies”

The Cranberries’ music got faster on 1996’s To the Faithful Departed, particularly on the lead single “Salvation” and “Forever Yellow Skies,” drummer Fergal Lawler’s finest performance.

“A Place I Know”