ENYA:
When Dreams Become Music
Occasionally there appear in the musical panorama small or great
marvels which take us to other worlds sometimes dreamy, sometimes romantic, ethereal,
magical. This is the case of a great artist, Enya,
who in her approximately fourteen years of a solo career (sixteen, if we count her two
years in the band Clannad) has achieved an unprecedented success with
each one of the CDs she has released: eight million copies were sold of her album Watermark (1988), which gave her the
platinum award in fourteen countries, six times in Australia and twice in Norway;
likewise, she sold 8.5 million copies of Shepherd Moons (1991), going platinum
once again in 18 countries, eight times in Taiwan, four in Spain, and twice in Japan. Not
to mention the number of times she has reached the top lists on countless radio stations
all over the world, as well as her growing international popularity, as seen in the almost
twenty million copies she has sold throughout her trajectory.
And we may wonder, how did she begin in music, how did her
successful career develop? Enya, as she is artistically known, was born
in Gweendore, in the county of Donegal, on the north-west of the Republic of Ireland, on
May 17th., 1961, her given name being Eithne Ni Bhraonain. The sixth of
nine children, after she left school she studied classical music. Her native tongue being
Gaelic, in 1980 she joined her siblings Maire, Pol, and Ciaran
in the band Clannad, with whom she toured Europe in different occasions,
and also recorded two albums, in which she played the keyboards and contributed to the
vocals. However, in 1982, she left the band, as she felt she could not exploit her full
potential since she used to be relegated to a merely backing role. This fact did not allow
her to express her creative genius the way she wished. Once Enya left the
family clan, she would join Clannad's ex-producer, Nicky Ryan,
who had also left the formation around the same dates, and both of them, together with Ryan's
wife, Roma, would become a successful team.
Enya's solo career would start thanks to David Puttnam,
who commissioned her to write the music for his movie The Frog Prince. Even
though only two of her compositions would then be used for the film, this fact meant a
certain degree of recognition in the adequate circles. When the BBC
decided to make their television series The Celts in 1986, Enya
was chosen to compose the soundtrack for the series, and the corresponding album was
released in 1987, although then it would not get a great success in the list of the 100
best records in the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, it would attract Rob Dickins's
attention, the manager of Warner Music UK, with whom Enya
would sign her contract, just when she was about to do so with another label. Dickins
decided to become the link Enya needed between her creative genius and
the record industry as soon as he perceived the enormous potential Enya
had to offer. Then her first solo single, Anywhere Is, was released. After it had
reached the British top lists, this led to the recording of her album Watermark,
which would give her immediate success, most specially when one of the songs, Orinoco
Flow, became the first single to get her to Number One in the top lists from many
countries.
The international popularity
that Enya has achieved has been spurred further thanks to her work on
television as well as in the movie soundtrack world. Apart from her soundtrack for the BBC
series, she has also composed other movie soundtracks, like for instance The Age Of
Innocence by Scorsese, or the one starred by Tom Cruise,
Far And Away. Enya admits that the fact that she had started her
career composing film soundtrack has led her to view all her compositions as different
themes, since her music can create a landscape and a given mood with each composition.
Writing movie soundtracks is an activity she has enjoyed a lot, and she hopes she will be
able to return to this field.
After Watermark, Enya has released new
albums, all and each one of them as successful as her first: Shepherd Moons, and
her recent release The Memory of Trees,
both of them in the same melodic, romantic, ethereal line, where her sensual voice
combines perfectly well her Celtic roots and the infinite possibilities that the
electronic instruments contribute to a whole which turns out to be harmonious, relaxing,
subtle, full of mystery, dreamlike, intertwining a music which can accurately be labelled
within the field of alternative musics, and whose magic attracts a wide range of listeners
from all ages. As usual, her latest album also contains pieces sung in Latin, Spanish,
Gaelic and English, as well as reflective piano pieces, together with other songs recorded
in a multi-track environment, all of this emphasizing the typical classicism we can find
in new age music, through instrumental fragments which may appear to have
some oriental touches and the use of crystalline voices which recall her work as a
traditional Irish composer. According to Enya, whenever she gets involved
in a new project, she has no definite plan in fact, but only some musical ideas that she
then develops, and she uses the language she feels more adequate at each given moment,
when and in the way she feels like. Her album The Celts was re-released in 1992,
reaching number ten in the Bristish lists.
Currently settled in Killiney,
near Dublin, Enya has now her own studio, specially designed and built
for her, in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey. If Enya decided to place her
studio in this quiet area, it was precisely so because of the silence she can enjoy in
this ideal site, viewing the mountains of Wicklow, with their impressive sights. As Enya
herself claims, this silence is exactly what she needs to concentrate on her compositions.
Perhaps it is because of her tendency towards perfectionism, yet
it's true she has never collaborated with other artists outside her own circle (except for
Nicky and Roma Ryan), nor has she given any live
performances at all, in spite of coming from a family of traditional musicians long
involved to the folkloric roots of her nation, nor has she - apart from the re-released
album The Celts - ever released further compilations of old material, nor any
special anthologies of previously unreleased material like so many other artists have
sometimes done. Enya only tends to write the pieces appearing in her
albums, no more, no less, and usually it is she herself the one to play the different
instruments used in her compositions, which means that each album takes her a long time to
finish. For instance, it took her almost two years to release her last album, The
Memory Of Trees. Nevertheless, lately Enya has been thinking of
giving a live performance some day, perhaps moved by her growing popularity. Nicky
Ryan, an expert sound engineer, claims that Industrial Light & Magic
- the company owned by the director of Star Wars, George Lucas,
who happens to be an enthusiastic fan of Enya's, has offered some
suggestions as to how she could be presented in a live concert. Even so, and despite the
fact that Enya has shown some interest in this, her cautious nature in
this sense has not allowed for any definite agreements as to that, even though
negotiations with a view to an eventual live concert have been taking place since the
release of her album Shepherd Moons. Though such an expected event would be
desirable indeed, since some live performances would possibly benefit her image, there is
nothing definite in this respect, and so far in certain circles Enya is
regarded as an eminently studio musician centered in the New Age styles.
By: Montse Andreu.
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