And new age-which Enya herself helped popularize but has long rejected as a marketing term-has largely been artistically redeemed, no longer relegated to the status of patchouli-scented muzak.
How and why, like so many women artists of the ’90s, was an innovator like Enya once so widely reduced to a cultural punchline? What has finally broken that stigma down? To start, music at large has become a less patriarchal place than it was when she debuted in the late ’80s. Last October, Angel Olsen listened to Enya’s epochal hit “Orinoco Flow” with a radio host and said, “I told my manager this is going to be my next move.” Back in March, Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius inquired on Twitter: “Was Enya the first to ever pop off.”īrandy’s question is a pointed one. Grimes once included 1987’s “Boadicea” on a list of her personal greatest songs of all time. Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood, has called Enya a “matriarchal force.” When FKA twigs mentioned how Enya inspired her song “ thousand eyes” last year, she went as far as to compare her to the queens of art pop, Björk and Kate Bush, calling her “a mother.” Current mother-to-be Nicki Minaj listened to Enya in the studio while making 2014’s The Pinkprint.
And as I did, I came to think of her like a Rosetta Stone for a particular thread of modern pop-music that is slow and hypnotic and restorative, with operatic melancholy, solitary strength, and a discernibly feminine sense of craft.
She and longtime collaborators Nicky and Roma Ryan turned this choral synthesizer music into the obsessive sound of serenity. Each mixes the ancient with the modern, folklore and ambience, the human and the electronic, containing hundreds of ornate layers of Enya’s own vocals and rhythms woven like cloth. Most popular among them are the earliest: her cinematic 1987 debut, The Celts 1988’s Watermark, the unlikeliest of pop smashes and 1991’s oceanic Shepherd Moons, which sold even more. From the windswept dream pop of “I Want Tomorrow” to the skylike chorus on “Anywhere Is,” from the wild arpeggiations of “Aldebaran” to the shaded beats and Gaelic lyrics on “Ebudae,” my journey with Enya became a reminder of how music could hold the days together when it felt like reality was in a free fall.Īt 59, Enya has now released eight studio albums. I now feel that the 19-song Enya primer I received in the final days of 2019 was cosmically tailored to prepare me for the impending hell of 2020. Last December, after noticing a substantial uptick in the number of effusive Enya fans in my orbit-both friends and musicians I follow-I finally asked someone for a mix of her best work.
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