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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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