Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    ENYA: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures
    ENYA: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures
    ENYA: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures
    Ebook48 pages39 minutes

    ENYA: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures

    By Chilly Gonzales

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time. Filling halls worldwide at the piano in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be dissecting the musicology of an Oasis hit, giving a sublime solo recital, and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. In his book about Enya, he asks: Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Gonzales delves beyond her innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya's singular music as well as the mysterious musician herself, and along the way uncovers new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRough Trade Books
    Release dateNov 18, 2020
    ISBN9781912722877
    ENYA: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures
    Author

    Chilly Gonzales

    CHILLY GONZALES is known as much for the intimate piano touch of his best-selling Solo Piano album trilogy as for his sweaty showmanship and composition for award-winning stars. He fills the world’s great philharmonic halls dressed in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be found giving a sublime solo recital, dissecting the musicology of a Billie Eilish hit and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. He performs and writes songs with Jarvis Cocker, Feist and Drake and won a Grammy for his collaboration on Daft Punk’s Best Album of the Year. A culmination of recent years’ explorations in teaching, Chilly Gonzales recently inaugurated his very own music school: The Gonzervatory.

    Related to ENYA

    Related ebooks

    Music For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      From Our Community

      Jul 7, 2021

      Sitting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House at the Crowded House Reunion concert. Our Vietnamese family amongst an a cappella choir of 6000 others singing “Fall at Your Feet,” thinking to myself, There are few moments in my life more Australian th

      5 min read

    • Article

      Miracles Wonder

      Nov 9, 2023

      Miracles Wonder
      10 min read

    • Article

      “Music Is A Bitch Goddess”

      Dec 2, 2024

      “Music Is A Bitch Goddess”
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mike Scott

      Dec 8, 2022

      Blonde On Blonde COLUMBIA, 1966 The first song I ever remember being moved by was “Blowin’ In The Wind”. But it wasn’t Bob Dylan’s version, it was Val Doonican’s – I was about five or six years old and it was on the TV. I don’t know why it moved me,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sonic Boom

      Apr 16, 2020

      Sonic Boom
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Soundtrack Of My Life

      Jul 21, 2020

      The Soundtrack Of My Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Music

      Feb 13, 2023

      Music
      4 min read

    • Article

      Durand Jones

      Apr 13, 2023

      “In A Sentimental Mood” IMPULSE!, 1963 That was the very first tune that, when I closed my eyes, I would forget what decade I was in. I had to be around 12 or 13 years old, but it made me feel like I’d lived on this planet before and I knew what this

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Flaming Lips

      Dec 27, 2016

      The Flaming Lips
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Playlist

      Jun 7, 2019

      The Playlist
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Soundtrack Of My Life

      Jul 23, 2019

      The Soundtrack Of My Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Nahko Bear

      Jul 31, 2020

      Nahko Bear
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Soundtrack Of My Life

      Dec 17, 2019

      The Soundtrack Of My Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Julia Jacklin

      Nov 14, 2019

      Julia Jacklin
      3 min read

    • Article

      JakobDylan

      Jun 17, 2021

      JakobDylan
      3 min read

    • Article

      Khruangbin

      Mar 15, 2022

      We had all the Beatles cassettes on rotation in the car growing up. I actually taught myself to read from the liner notes – you think about it, “Love Me Do”, they’re all kinda short words! But my Beatles record was Revolver. Still today, every time w

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sounds Unforgettable

      Sep 23, 2022

      Sounds Unforgettable
      6 min read

    • Article

      Gregory Porter

      Jun 12, 2020

      Gregory Porter
      12 min read

    • Article

      Little Scream

      Oct 26, 2019

      When I was 13 my dad started dating a harp player who had recently traded in her pink mohawk for a smart, long auburn bob to get a job in the symphony orchestra. I was a socially awkward Star Trek loving book nerd with large glasses and hair that alw

      2 min read

    • Article

      Clare Grogan

      Aug 18, 2022

      Rock On CBS, 1973 I grew up in a household of three generations who all loved music, which was an absolute gift. But they all had their own tastes, they all had their own record collection, and we only had one record player – so music was always a bi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Neil Finn

      Mar 29, 2024

      The very first record I ever owned was Let It Be. My brother bought it for me for my 12th birthday, so it had a major effect on me. In hindsight it probably isn’t their strongest record, but it’s still pretty outstanding. “Across The Universe” is a g

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for ENYA

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      ENYA - Chilly Gonzales

      I wrote a book about Enya and the mystery of taste. It’s a musician’s memoir and a treatise on unguilty pleasures.

      Chilly Gonzales

      Contents

      Title Page

      Epigraph

      Lullaby Voice

      1

      Unguilty Pleasure

      2

      Saying No

      3

      Epilogue

      Copyright

      I don’t remember my mother ever singing me a lullaby. She had many voices, just not one for lullabies. She had a squawking Jewish mother voice for storytelling, an icy almost-British accent for when she was having fights, an exaggerated Miss Piggy yell to get our attention in the basement (this was the voice she was best known for among my friends)… but she didn’t have a soothing voice in her repertoire. She was never natural, always performing. So, no lullabies for me.

      And anyway, a lullaby isn’t a performance. It’s basically folk music; it serves a social purpose. The lullaby already existed before the conscious pretense of artistic musical expression. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but folk music (communal storytelling through music) always seemed less selfish as compared to pop music (Lionel Richie dancing upside down). At least, my pop music felt selfish: I started making music to get attention, to live out a fantasy. I made sure that my virtuosity was proof of my talent and the worst insult I could imagine was someone telling me it reminded them of a lullaby. My motivation was so ego-driven, how was my music supposed to bind people together? I always envied musicians who made music for a social purpose: gospel musicians for God, DJs for dancing, folk musicians for community, and lullabies for soothing children.

      Contra pop music, a lullaby has no backing band or beat. Usually zero accompaniment. It has to work by itself a cappella. You can’t rely on a strange, unexpected harmonic twist to provide drama in the musical storytelling, like the nothing really matters chord in the opening of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. You can’t count on a sonic surprise like the awkward stutter of muted guitar strings before the chorus of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. No saxophone solos, no filter sweep, no autotune. A lullaby, in fact, is pure melody, the voice itself.

      I’ve always been old-fashioned when it comes to respecting melody. Melody is the surface of a song, the façade of the building. So, when someone asks you if you’ve heard a new song, they’ll just sing the melody. "You know the one that goes groove is in the hea-ar-ar-ar-art?" For most people, the melody is the whole song.

      Harmony—the chords that support the melody—is the invisible foundation of the building. These chords have the unglamorous power to maximize emotions in a song, but chords aren’t enough to be a song by themselves, and you definitely can’t hum a chord. Imagine ‘With or Without You’ if Bono never started singing. Harmony is melody’s bitch, with no life of its own.

      Hearing a melody a cappella, divorced from its harmony and expelled from its sound-world, is a kind of test. Does it still sound like music, when it’s sung, just like that, by a civilian (an amateur)? The ultimate test:

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1