“Dreams” by The Cranberries

"Dreams" was the Cranberries' debut single on Island, and it became a highlight of the band's 1993 debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? It had been around longer than that: a demo came out in Ireland only in 1990, when the band still went by the Cranberry Saw Us.

Dolores O'Riordan wrote it with guitarist Noel Hogan, and Stephen Street produced and engineered the finished version. It's a rush of chiming electric guitar from Hogan, with Mike Hogan's bass and Fergal Lawler's drums surging underneath and O'Riordan's acoustic guitar strummed in the background, but the real event is her voice: soaring, keening, breaking into swooping yelps that sound like nothing else on the radio. Right at the end, the backing vocals belong to Mike Mahoney, O'Riordan's ex-boyfriend, a strange little twist tucked into a song this lovestruck-sounding.

In America it got inside the Hot 100's top 50, in Britain inside the top 30, and three different videos were made to push it, directed by John Maybury, Peter Scammell and Nico Soultanakis. The band returned to it in 2017 with a stripped-down acoustic version on Something Else.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.