Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

ENYA

(b Eithne Ni Bhraonain, 17 May '61, Donegal, Ireland) Composer, vocalist. Her surname is Gaelic for Brennan; she was a member of folk-rock group Clannad '80s with her siblings, then went solo because the others weren't allowing her enough of a voice. They thought she was crazy, but she took their manager Nicky Ryan and his wife lyricist Roma with her and they went to work in Ryan's studio. David Puttnam hired her to score film The Frog Prince '85, the BBC to score The Celts for TV '87 (her first album Enya '88 was issued by the BBC, reissued '92 as The Celts; Barry Dickins of WB UK fell in love with the sound of it and signed her as an artist with very little commercial track record. Watermark '89 went top 40 in the USA with top 25 single 'Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)', selling eight million around the world; Shepherd Moons '91 (single 'Caribbean Blue') spent nearly 200 weeks in the US album chart, and The Memory Of Trees '95 was next to sell itself. With occasional help from musicians such as Davy Spillane, Neil Buckley and Chris Hughes on various intruments, she writes tunes that sound like chants, Roma adds lyrics to some of them (sometimes in Latin, Gaelic or Spanish) and Ryan produces, using up to more than 100 overdubs (impossible without digital technology) to make a sonic wash which is either deeply spiritual or new age wallpaper music. She had scored seven films by '95.