Although Enya’s training, both as a pianist and a composer, was in classical music, her roots are in the Irish folk tradition. Roma particularly is valued, because she’s the one who puts words-sometimes English, sometimes Gaelic, sometimes Latin-to Enya’s melodies. “And I can see by their reaction that, yes, this is what I’m trying to say,” she says. Any time Enya has a new song in the works, they’re the first to hear it. It helps that she has a reliable sounding board in Nicky and Roma Ryan. ‘Why did I feel compelled to write this kind of a melody? What draws me to this?’ And usually, I can find the answers. “You really don’t know what you’re looking for,” she says. Her diaries mainly concern her musical process-both the soul-searching that goes into understanding the emotions beneath the music and a document of how, exactly, she and producer Nicky Ryan tried to capture that sound on tape. But she’s so animated and involved as she describes the process-laughing, joking, fixing the listener with her bright green eyes-that it’s hard to imagine her ever becoming morbidly self-absorbed. Given the quiet, reflective nature of Enya’s music, you might think her ponderings of the past would involve serious soul-searching. And that’s kind of the feeling I had with the. Something will trigger it off, and you’re back there. “It’s incredible, because you are back at that day.
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“I’ve been known just to sit down and pick a day,” she says. Moreover, she makes a habit of going back and reading what she has written. Enya is a dedicated diarist and has been keeping a journal since her career got underway. I think again of writing the melody, and I’m back there. “For me, it’s very different to listen to the music,” she says, “because it’s reliving each story. A decade had passed since the release of her first album, “The Celts,” and she was intrigued by the opportunity to look back at what she had done and “ponder the music,” as she puts it. But for Enya, “Paint the Sky With Stars” was a different sort of journey.
#THE BEST OF ENYA ALBUM COVER SERIES#
While in New York, she did both “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Late Show With David Letterman.” Now she is sitting in a hotel room doing a series of interviews for print media.įor some acts, a best-of album marks the end of the road.
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As she promotes her fifth album, “Paint the Sky With Stars: The Best of Enya,” the singer and instrumentalist slowly is raising her media profile. In fact, she was for a while the world’s most anonymous superstar, a performer whose music-a one-of-a-kind sound drawing heavily on classical and Celtic traditions-was instantly recognizable to millions but whose face was a mystery. Of Irish pop acts, only U2 tops her in sales and success.īut unlike U2, Enya never has toured. At 36, she is the second-biggest pop act in Ireland, having sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. There’s always something new.”īut she doesn’t quite see the world the way other musicians of her stature would. Traveling brings out the observer in her, allowing her to note differences among people and places, countries and cultures. Like many musicians, Enya loves being on the road.