How do I explain what you meant to me? What words convey that deeply felt sense of connection I’ve always had with you?

South Florida, 1998. I am digging through my dad’s floor-to-ceiling CD rack when I discover No Need to Argue, your second studio album. There you are, seated awkwardly on the ground between those three guys in a pose that suggests a kind of coiled, spring-loaded energy. You aren’t sitting there to get comfortable. You are sitting there because that is the best place to conserve your life force until you are ready to pounce, which might happen at any moment. Your fashion feels deliberate and important: a dark navy blazer and pants over a white t-shirt, with lace up tall black boots, maroon lipstick, a bit of mascara, and the most incredible bleached blonde short hair. I’d never wanted to be someone so badly in my life.

Of course, my desire was complicated on several levels. First, I was supposed to be a boy. That’s what the doctors had stamped on my birth certificate, and it’s what every single person I had ever met in my life told me I was. I had no reason to believe that they were all lying to me. And yet, for the years I spent staring at that picture and playing the album, I lived through Dolores. She represented the opposite of everything I was, which was everything I wanted to be: tough, in-control, graceful, sexy, bold, fearless. Who better to be a model for a troubled, closeted trans kid?

No one in my suburban Florida hometown looked like her. So it was easy to imagine that she came from a magical alternate universe that I could access only in my imagination. This world was gritty, urban, and hip, filled with rock and roll bars, booze, drugs, cool kids who liked hanging out with me, and absolutely no grown ups (the rock stars themselves occupied a place of permanent adolescence in my mind, which is not terribly far from the truth).

When I started my first band in high school with a few friends, I often dressed in a black suit and white shirt. Anyone watching those shows might have pegged me as a teen boy trying to look more like a formal, grown up man. I doubt anyone, however, suspected that I was channeling, in my own clandestine way, my hero Dolores. After all, wasn’t she subverting gender norms in her own way? It was one thing to want to be a girl. It was something else to want to be a girl who dressed like a boy with short hair and makeup. What kind of sense did that make?

But it was always her voice that brought me clarity. The emotional range of her soprano was dizzying. One minute she’d be breathily serenading a new lover (“Dreams”), the next she’d be excoriating some fool who dared to betray her, halfway between choked sob and scream (“How”). In that sense, she reminded me more of an actor than a musician. Yet, like any good actor, she drew from a rich inner wellspring of experience and feeling. I didn’t have the power or self-knowledge to express myself. But I had her, and she was expressive enough for the both of us.

I heard the Cranberries everywhere in the late nineties: radio stations, grocery stores, adults’ cars, shopping malls. Whenever a song like “Zombie” would come on in public, I felt like a veil had been lifted between the mundane, repressed reality of my childhood and the fantasy life I’d increasingly come to inhabit. The contrast was jarring. The intensity of emotion felt entirely out of place. Or maybe that’s the kind of music that will be in highest demand in those empty suburban places where nothing happens and no one says how they really feel.The bland conformity of our environs seemed to stifle every attempt at authenticity, but artists like the Cranberries could speak our deepest longings. We needed them to shriek, wail, plead, and confess for us. Their music became our emotional life support.

When I started to transition my gender in my early twenties, Dolores was still a model for the kind of woman I yearned to become. I wanted to be strong and confident while accessing that beautiful grace and vulnerability. I also wanted to have short hair and wear punky clothes. This set off a series of arguments with people close to me who thought I was sabotaging myself. “Don’t you want to ‘pass’ as a woman? Don’t you want to look like ‘normal’ women look?” I countered that if I was going to all this trouble of transitioning, I wanted to be the woman I truly was rather than how society expected me to be. I don’t think I could have asserted myself so strongly if not for her guidance.

I continue to play rock music. Most recently, I have been performing music from a rock opera I’ve composed (The Red Shades: A Trans Superhero Rock Opera). When people give me feedback that the work is “raw,” “honest,” and “emotionally vivid,” I have to believe that some of Dolores has rubbed off on my creative process.

When I heard the news that you left this world today, I felt as though a piece of me had been torn asunder. For most of my life, you’ve been my mouthpiece when I couldn’t speak, my fantasy when I needed to believe in another way of living. In truth, I know very little about you as a person, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes a great artist creates work that resonates beyond her own life, and creates ripples of change beyond what she would have ever expected.

Tonight, after I found out that your body had left us, I went for a drive. I thanked you for everything you have given to me, said goodbye, popped in your first CD, and let the tears roll down my face.

“I’m not ready for this
Though I thought I would be.
I can’t see the future
Though I thought I could see.
I don’t want to leave you
Even though I have to.
I don’t want to love you.
Oh, I still do.”

-The Cranberries (“I Still Do”)