In 1997 came the release of a greatest-hits collection, Paint the Sky with Stars: The Best of Enya, which featured two new songs. charts at number nine and sold over two million copies within its first year of release. The record, entitled Memory of Trees, was released in December 1995. charts at number 17 and remained in the Top 200 for almost four years.Īgain, Enya was slow to follow up on the success of Shepherd Moons, spending nearly four years working on her fourth album. Shepherd Moons was even more successful than its predecessor, eventually selling over ten million copies worldwide it entered the U.S. She finally released Shepherd Moons, her follow-up to Watermark, in 1991. Enya spent the years following the success of Watermark rather quietly her most notable appearance was a cameo on Sinéad O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. The soundtrack was released in 1986 as her eponymous solo album.Įnya didn't receive much notice, but Enya and the Ryans' second effort, Watermark, became a surprise hit upon its release in 1988.
Within a few years, she was commissioned, along with producer/arranger Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan, to provide the score for a BBC-TV series called The Celts. In 1982, she left Clannad, claiming that she was uninterested in following the pop direction the group had begun to pursue.
Enya joined the band as a keyboardist in 1980 and contributed to several of the group's popular television soundtracks. Most important to Enya's career were her siblings, who formed Clannad in 1970 with several of their uncles. Her father, Leo Brennan, was the leader of the Slieve Foy Band, a popular Irish show band her mother was an amateur musician. Watermark established Enya as an international star and launched a successful career that has continued into the new millennium.Įnya (born Eithne Ní Bhraonáin) was born into a musical family. Enya then recorded Watermark (1988), which featured her distinctive, flowing music and multi-overdubbed trancelike singing the album sold eight million copies worldwide.
The result was a successful album of TV music for the BBC. She stayed with Clannad for two years, then left, hooking up with producer Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan, with whom she recorded film and television scores. Enya is from Gweedore, County Donegal, Ireland, which she left in 1980 to join the Irish band Clannad, the group that already featured her older brothers and sisters. Enya, notoriously described as “not exactly a barrel of laughs,” who hates going to nightclubs, could very well post a TikTok video within the year, that is just how uncertain these times are.įor now, may I suggest watching the video for “The Celts” she recently posted, in which she is led into the forest by a child before getting in a boat, where she waits for her sexy horseman.With her blend of folk melodies, synthesized backdrops, and classical motifs, Enya created a distinctive style that more closely resembled new age than the folk and Celtic music that provided her initial influences.
But her posting is a sign that even our most dutifully offline global citizens are straining in self-isolation for human contact. WATERMARK, ENYA!!!!ĭo we know for sure that it is Enya herself logging on from her Irish castle, out of boredom, surrounded by her cats? Of course not. I don’t know what 4k is, but of course, Enya. “Experience ‘Only Time’ in 4k for the very first time,” she said intriguingly on April 24. “Which Enya song are you listening to today?” she asked us on March 20. Indeed, she hadn’t posted since December, but in March she began tweeting and Instagramming in what we can imagine for Enya is earnestness.
Before that, Enya’s social media accounts were tantalizingly dormant, laying fallow for months at a time. Yes, is “popping off,” as one Cut editor put it, which, for anyone who was already following her, means that she is posting a few times a month.
The season of online meltdowns compounded by quarantine fatigue continues apace, but it might be a blessing for us all, at least in this repesting: Enya is posting.