Song of the Day 11/25: The Cranberries, “Ode to My Family”
Happy Thanksgiving! Or, as they call it à Paris, jeudi. American culture is consumed everywhere, so Parisians are aware of Thanksgiving, but only expat Americans celebrate it. In some regards, this makes preparing the meal simple — the butcher down the street understood right away why we ordered a fresh whole turkey, yet it was easy as pie to order it on Tuesday and pick it up Wednesday afternoon.
Well, easy as some types of pie. Other kinds are quite hard — pecan, for instance. Certain American products needed for a traditional Thanksgiving meal, like the Karo syrup for pecan pie, are as scarce as Lucky Charms. Luckily, a few specialty shops cater to Americans homesick for foods that simply don’t cross the Atlantic — mostly candies and snacks, but at this time of year, also Karo syrup, Stovetop stuffing mix, fresh cranberries and, rarest of all, canned cranberry sauce.
“Cranberry sauce,” as any Beatles fan knows, is the phrase John Lennon slowly intoned in the background of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the phrase misheard as “I buried Paul” during the “Paul is dead” mania. That’s probably what prompted a young band in late-’80s Limerick, Ireland, to dub themselves The Cranberry Saw Us, a name shortened to the Cranberries when 18-year-old singer Delores O’Riordan joined the group in 1990.
O’Riordan said she wrote this song out of homesickness while the Cranberries were touring the U.S. for the first time. It appeared on “No Time to Argue,” 1994’s follow-up to their breakthrough album, “Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?” Though never released as a single — the record company wanted people to buy the whole LP — it reached No. 11 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.
