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    The Secret To Enya's Success

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    The Secret To Enya's Success

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    The secret to Enya's success_

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    The Secret To Enya's Success

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    Steve Watkins

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    A B UM B L IN G CAPER CO M EDY

    MUSIC

    The Faerie Queen


    The secret to Enya’s success.
    By JODY ROSEN
    DEC 27, 2005 • 6:06 AM
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    Who is Enya? More to the point: What is she? It’s a question you can’t help
    but ask of the 44-year-old singer from County Donegal, Ireland, who, over the
    past 20 years, has carved a niche as popular music’s faerie queen. She’s
    slathered her songs in otherworldly reverb, overdubbed her voice into angelic
    choirs, and appeared in music videos gliding through mist-shrouded
    landscapes. When we last heard from her, in 2002, she was crooning songs
    on the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack—in Elvish. On the cover of her new
    album, Amarantine, she gazes out with big dewy moon eyes, wearing what
    appears to be a spinnaker. Search beneath its billows and you would
    undoubtedly ind a pair of wings and a wand.

    Enya may not be of this earth, but she’s done rather well here. She began her
    career in 1980, singing with her brothers and sisters in Clannad, which
    blended pop tunes and traditional Irish folk music. She left the family band
    two years later, hooking up with producer/composer Nicky Ryan and lyricist
    Roma Ryan, the husband and wife who remain her collaborators to this day.
    The trio worked on ilm and television scores for several years before
    graduating in 1987 to proper albums,but those early gigs left their mark. To
    call Enya’s music “cinematic” is an understatement—nearly every song plays
    like the soundtrack for a majestic ilm montage, with the camera swooping
    from lush green valleys to craggy coastlines and upward, zipping past
    mountain peaks, punching through cloud cover, soaring into the blue and
    beyond, to touch the face of God, or Gandalf.

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    On the opening song of Enya’s self-titled debut album, “The Celts,” this
    potent formula is already in place. A synth bassline provides a gentle throb; a
    major key melody swells, crests, recedes, and swells again. Rising over the
    music is Enya, or rather, Enyas—her voice multitracked into what sounds like
    a Gregorian choir on helium. The production values have been re ined in the
    years since, with a synthesized string orchestra sound replacing the debut
    album’s garish keyboard gusts. But Enya and the Ryans haven’t altered their
    basic musical template one bit. And why should they? Enya broke through to
    a mass audience with Watermark (1988) and has gone on to sell 65 million
    records worldwide. The arrival of Amarantine, currently No. 10 on the
    Billboard album chart, is a reminder that Enya is one of the savviest
    operators in the music business and, well, an original. Twenty years ago, no
    one dreamed that there would be a huge audience for an ethereal female
    vocalist singing pseudo-classical airs with misty mystical overtones—and
    Enya remains the genre’s only practitioner. No one has even tried to imitate
    her.

    On Amarantine, Enya delivers her usual goods. The mood is worshipful and
    the tempos stately. There is a great deal of plinking and plucking; Enya is
    fond of harpsichords (or synthesizer approximations thereof) and, especially,
    pizzicato, the engine of many of her songs, including her signature hit,
    “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away).” The new album’s title track (and irst single) is
    an Enya song par excellence, with every beat of every measure marked by
    little string stabs, the singer’s voice majestically in lated by reverb and the
    lyrics a string of fuzzy beatitudes: “You know love is with you when you rise/
    For night and day belong to love.” The song is insipid and insu erable; it may
    be the worst thing I’ve heard on the radio all year. It’s also a iendishly
    e ective mood-piece.

    Enya has sold more records than any Irish artist besides U2, and she has
    leveraged her roots, lavoring songs with uilleann pipes, singing in Gaelic, and
    gesturing in other ways to Riverdance enthusiasts. But Enya’s real musical
    sources are less Old Eire than High Church. There is a maxim variously
    attributed to Bob Dylan and Elton John—”When in doubt, write a hymn”—
    and Enya and the Ryans have written hymns ad nauseam. Their signature
    trick is the use of multitracking to create the soul-stirring lushness of a full
    vocal choir. It’s a cost-saving measure, for one thing. Why hire a roomful of
    monks when you can conjure a plainchant choir by simply overdubbing
    Enya’s voice to in inity? The result is a singular sound—unreal, inhuman,
    spooky, and “spiritual”—perfect for those who desire the mystique of
    medieval choral music without, you know, the medieval music or the chorus.
    Naturally, it’s impossible to replicate this e ect in live performance, and Enya
    has never mounted a concert tour, which has only added to her air of
    mystery. Roma Ryan, meanwhile, has made the churchy connection explicit,
    writing several songs for Enya in Latin.

    On Amarantine, though, there’s a di erent kind of linguistic stunt. Inspired


    by their Fellowship of the Ring experiment with Elvish, Enya and Roma Ryan
    decided to create their own language, Loxian. I wish I could report that this
    gambit involves smoked salmon; in fact, it revolves around the more banal
    topic of extraterrestrials. The Loxians, Ryan told the Guardian, “Are much
    like us. They’re in space, somewhere in the night. They’re looking out, they’re
    mapping the stars, and wondering if there is anyone else out there. It’s to do
    with that concept: are we alone in the universe?”

    Ryan has written a book about the language, Water Shows the Hidden Heart
    (also the title of a song on Amarantine), in which we learn, among other
    things, how to ask a Loxian if he’d like a cup of tea (“Hanee unnin eskan?”).
    The lyricist claims that it was necessary to invent an alternative language
    because “some pieces that Enya writes, English will just not sit on.” But
    judging by songs like “Less Than a Pearl,” one of three Loxian numbers on the
    new album, Loxian is not appreciably more melli luous than English or Gaelic
    or Latin or any of the other terrestrial tongues in which Enya has sung. I
    suspect other, cheekier motives: an e ort to deepen Enya’s reputation as a
    mystic and to tighten her grip on the Hobbit crowd. What’s Loxian for “brand
    extension”?

    The truth is, it really doesn’t matter what language Enya is singing in. No one
    is listening to her words; the beginning and the end of her appeal is that big
    gauzy sound. Even if you hate the aesthetic, you have to respect the craft.
    Beneath Enya’s billowing sonic mists, you can discern the structures and
    symmetries of classic pop songwriting: the melodic hooks that leap out from
    every song, the revitalizing excursion of an eight-measure bridge, the
    triumphal return to the main theme. It all might be perfectly tolerable if it
    weren’t so queasily feather-light. As Enya’s career has progressed, and her
    air-goddess shtick has become more entrenched, the bottom end has
    disappeared from her songs, to the point where, on Amarantine, there is
    virtually no bass, no lower-register sounds, nothing to ground the music.
    Enya would do well to remember that, once in a while, everyone—earthling,
    Middle-Earthling, and Loxian alike—needs to bang on a drum.

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