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The Untold Truth Of Enya
Does Enya make music, or does Enya weave evocative,
imaginative, soul-stirring, mind-opening soundscapes?
However one can classify the artist — she's a singer, a
musician, a guide to the ethereal world of richly
produced New Age ideas combined with traditional Irish
sounds — one can't deny that her work has resonated
with millions. With memorable hits such as "Only Time"
and "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)," Enya is one of the
best-selling artists of all time, and certainly one of
the most popular non-rock, country, or R&B musicians.
Despite this success, she has unleashed just a handful
of mysterious and haunting albums since the 1980s,
carefully crafting a perpetual soundtrack for
relaxation, meditation, and millions of chill-out
sessions.
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of-enya/
Her compositions and performances are so next-level, as
spiritual and inscrutable as they are inviting, that
the world wants to know about Enya's whole deal. Who is
she, really? Where is she from? What does she do when
she isn't composing and singing fairy-tale-like music?
She's a private person, but an interesting one, and an
uncompromising and singular artist all the way. Here's
about all there is to know about Enya.
Enya left a big band and found even more success
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of-enya/
Before Enya came along, one of the few acts to perform
in the specific milieu of traditional Celtic pop-meets-
New Age music was Clannad, an Irish family band whose
name literally means "family" in Gaelic. Clannad
released five albums between 1973 and 1980, the latter
being the same year that Eithne Bhraonain — who would
later be known as Enya — joined her immediate family in
the group. It was also around that time when Clannad
started to sell a lot of records around Europe —
particularly the U.K.
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of-enya/
But by 1982, when Clannad scored a top-five chart hit
with its theme song for the British TV show "Harry's
Game," Enya had already left the group. Clannad's
manager, Nicky Ryan, had persuaded her to join the
band, and in 1982, Ryan dropped Clannad as a client.
"We had a fall-out, it was one guy who was going too
far with the drink," Ryan told The Quietus. "I said,
'it's either him or me,' and they said, 'it's you,
you're out, because he's a brother.'" During the
confrontation, the rest of Clannad made Enya decide
where her loyalties lay. She opted to depart with Ryan,
along with his wife and collaborator, lyricist Roma
Ryan.
Enya is a person but also a band
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of-enya/
The names of some musical artists refer to individuals,
others to a band, and a few still to both. In the
latter category are acts like Alice Cooper, Marilyn
Manson, and Enya, with a moniker that represents both a
group and its front person. The face of the Enya
operation and its most visible and active contributor
is the vocalist born Eithne Ni Bhraonain, from
Gweedore, County Donegal, Ireland, who performs under
the stage name of Enya.
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of-enya/
However, Enya is also the name for a tight-knit trio of
musicians that have worked together since the 1980s, to
create the albums bearing the Enya name. The singer
Enya composes the melodies for all of the songs
created, while Roma Ryan writes the lyrics, and her
husband, Nicky Ryan, records, produces, and mixes the
recordings. The trio has never worked with anyone else
under the Enya umbrella, and since 1982, all have
contributed to the management of every element of the
singer Enya's career.
As Enya is really a collective and not one person,
Bhraonain and the Ryans have all shared in certain
successes. For example, the Oscar nomination for the
Enya song "May It Be," that appeared in the 2001 film
"The Lord of the Rings," went to all three musicians,
not just the singer known as Enya.
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of-enya/
After breaking away from Clannad to create a new act
with Nicky Ryan and Roma Ryan, Enya moved into the
married couple's house in Artane, a suburb of Dublin,
Ireland. Nicky Ryan put together an in-home studio and
Enya began to compose and record vocal-free instrument
pieces, featuring herself playing the cello, saxophone,
and piano. "It was Roma who said to me, 'this is very
visual,'" Enya told The Quietus of her collaborator's
reaction to her first project. "Nicky had this idea for
years and years of using the voice as an instrument,
not just layering string parts." Roma encouraged Enya
to sing, too, and create a distinctive element of the
Enya sound.
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of-enya/
With the idea in mind that the collection of songs they
recorded together had a visual feel, they sent a demo
tape to movie producer David Putnam, who placed two
tracks credited to Enya on the soundtrack of the 1985
film "The Frog Prince." Putnam's advocacy for the group
led to another soundtrack gig. The Enya trio scored all
six episodes of the BBC documentary miniseries "The
Celts." Six works created for that show wound up on
Enya's first standalone, self-titled album.
She's a master of Enya-nomics
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of-enya/
By almost any metric, Enya is among the most successful
musicians of all time. More than 80 million Enya albums
have been purchased globally since the mid-1980s, and
the singer's net worth sits in excess of $135 million.
But Enya racked up those stats with an approach to
promotion and publicity that differs from that of
almost every other top-selling musician, one that seems
almost counter-intuitive. She doesn't release many
singles; only two on which she's the lead performer
have reached the top 30 of the American pop chart, and
airplay on mainstream radio is virtually non-existent.
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of-enya/
Enya has also never staged a concert tour, she rarely
even performs live at all, and has never allowed for
the manufacture or sale of official merchandise bearing
her name and image. "I always felt fame and success
were two different things," Enya told Express. "It felt
to me I don't really need to flaunt it, to sell the
music."
And Enya only sells that music when she feels like
making it. She asked that Warner Music UK write into
her first recording contract a stipulation that she
only needed to release an album every three years.
Later in her career, Enya would go nearly a decade
without recording a new LP. Economists coined a term to
describe the Enya machine, in which the music virtually
sells itself: "Enya-nomics." The singer was asked to
lecture on the topic at Harvard Business School, but
she turned down the offer.
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of-enya/
When "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)" hit the radio in 1988,
nothing else sounded like the lilting, mystical
combination of reverberating vocals and synthesized
orchestral sounds. "Orinoco Flow" was a major hit,
topping the pop chart in the U.K. and reaching the top
30 of the Billboard Hot 100.
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of-enya/
But "Orinoco Flow" might have been a little too
different. Over the decades, "Orinoco Flow" turned into
a joke. It was frequently used on soundtracks when the
scene needed music to mock, or to ironically underscore
scenes that looked the opposite of what "Orinoco Flow"
sounded like. For example, two older people were
presented as out-of-touch nerds when dancing to the
tune on "Cougar Town," and it popped up in "Brooklyn
Nine-Nine" for a scene when a triumphant detective
wanted to look like a tough guy.
The use of "Orinoco Flow" in the 2018 adolescent drama
"Eighth Grade" may have brought the song a new
appreciation. Writer-director Bo Burnham struck on the
idea of using Enya for a scene where its main character
finds her brain coming alive as she checks social
media. "I listened to 'Orinoco Flow' and was like, this
song is so weird. This song is so much cooler and
stranger than I remember it being, and it's also very
deep," Burnham told HuffPost. Burnham secured the
rights by writing an earnest and personal letter
directly to Enya.
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of-enya/
One of the first songs Enya ever released was a track
called "Boadicea," which appeared on her debut, self-
titled album in the mid-1980s. Characterized by reverb-
heavy vocals and sharp synthesizer stabs, the song has
endured over the decades and is one of Enya's most
listened-to works because of frequent repurposing. It's
been sampled in more than 50 hip-hop songs, from Lab-
Tek's "Weird Science" in 1993, to RAF Camora's "Intro"
in 2023. In between, the Enya composition was featured
prominently in some big rap hits.
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of-enya/
Diddy sampled "Boadicea" for "I Don't Wanna Know," his
no. 2 hit collaboration with Mario Winans, and he gave
Enya a "featuring" credit. When the Fugees used
"Boadicea" in its 1996 hit "Ready or Not," the group
failed to acknowledge Enya in any way or get prior
permission. "With the Fugees, we were actually on the
verge of suing them because of the copyright
infringement, because they just didn't approach us,"
Enya told Forbes.
Enya refused to get on board 'Titanic'
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of-enya/
The Titanic luxury cruise liner was constructed in
Belfast, now part of the U.K. constituent
country Northern Ireland, and its last European stop
before it set sail for its ill-fated April 1912 voyage
to Newfoundland was Queenstown, Ireland. There's a lot
of Irish history in the story of Titanic, and when
director James Cameron was making the 1997 blockbuster
film "Titanic," he wanted that to be felt throughout
the score. He asked Irish singer Enya to compose the
music for the movie. "I was sent a script and they were
actually working with some of my music as they were
filming," Enya told Forbes. "But what happened was when
we were talking about the end song, it was to be a
collaboration and that's something that I've actually
never done."
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of-enya/
Because Cameron wanted Enya, a performer of great
success and renown, to just write and not sing the
movie's theme song, she turned down the offer. Cameron
instead turned to James Horner, who won Academy Awards
for Original Dramatic Score and for Original Song (for
"My Heart Will Go On," as interpreted by Celine Dion).
She's not afraid to take a break
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of-enya/
Due in part to her reluctance to follow the
entertainment industry standard and aggressively
promote her music far and wide, Enya has earned a
reputation as an enigmatic, solitary figure, or
something less than a team player. "I'm portrayed like
a recluse because I don't do any interviews," Enya told
Express, thus striking down that perception, "but
that's because I want the focus to remain on the
music." Another way that the mystery surrounding the
musician builds is due to her not releasing albums at a
regular, consistent, or prolific rate. "She's not a
recluse," Enya said of herself to the Irish
Independent. "She's working."
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of-enya/
After the 1988 release of her breakthrough hit LP
"Watermark," Enya waited three years to debut "Shepherd
Moons," and followed that four years later with "The
Memory of Trees." Her next two albums, "A Day Without
Rain" and "Amarantine," each arrived after a five-year
break, while "Dark Sky Island" is the singer's last
studio LP to date, and it hit stores way back in 2015.
Moya Brennan claims her sister, Enya, is at work on new
material — as of 2019. "She's grand — busy doing
stuff," Brennan told the Irish Independent.
An Enya song became a post-9/11 grief anthem
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of-enya/
In November 2000, Enya ended a three-year musical
hiatus with the U.K. release of the single "Only Time,"
a cut from the album "A Day Without Rain." Nearly a
year later, it would become Enya's first (and to date,
only) top-10 hit in the United States. That's all
because it organically became a cultural touchstone as
a nexus point of grief.
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of-enya/
Initially written as a song about the end of a romantic
relationship, "Only Time" became the soundtrack for
CNN's coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
on New York City. While montages of destruction,
devastation, and tragedy filled the screen, the Enya
song played in the background. "And when I saw the
footage it was absolutely so moving," Enya told "The
Late Late Show." "Only Time" jumped off of CNN and into
the collective consciousness, as listeners used it to
help process their grief over the national tragedy.
Enya asked her record label to commercially release
"Only Time" as a single in the U.S., strictly as an act
of charity. It became the most-played radio song of
2001, and the substantial proceeds from the song were
donated to the Uniformed Firefighters Association's
Widows' and Children's Fund.
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of-enya/
She lives in a literal fortress
Alantobey/Getty Images
By 1997, Enya was a little more than a decade into her
career as an established solo artist, and she'd already
sold in excess of 20 million copies of her albums. She
used a small portion of her quickly amassed fortune to
invest in real estate. That year, Enya purchased Ayesha
Castle for 2.5 million pounds (the equivalent of $3.1
million).
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of-enya/
Originally called Victoria Castle, the towering edifice
was built by a County Dublin local in 1840, in honor of
Queen Victoria, who had been crowned two years earlier.
"It was placed on the hill, and he was hoping to entice
Queen Victoria to come visit," Enya told BuzzFeed. "But
she never came." The singer renamed the castle
Manderley, after the grand, imposing, and gothic home
in Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel "Rebecca." Enya's
neighbors include Bono of U2.
The inside of the residential castle has since been
renovated, and it houses six bedrooms, a couple of
standalone apartments, a courtyard, and a purpose-built
secure area. Enya has endured more than one violent
encounter with stalkers. In 1997, a troubled Enya fan
was ordered to leave a pub owned by the singer's
parents, before harming himself. In 2005, another
stalker defeated the multiple defenses and securities
offered by a Victorian-era castle and made it inside
Manderley. He used ropes to restrain a member of Enya's
staff and escaped before authorities came. Enya spent
the two-hour ordeal inside her panic room.
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of-enya/
Enya's romantic life has forever remained a mystery.
She doesn't discuss such relationships in interviews,
and she's never been half of a high-profile public
couple. It's likely that the singer hasn't even
seriously pursued a romance in many years, simply
because it doesn't align with her goals, interests, or
lifestyle.
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of-enya/
"Falling madly in love and getting married would be the
most horrific thing that could happen," Enya told The
Irish Times in 2015. The reason is simple enough:
partners get in the way of Enya making her art. "Even
though the person will understand that at the
beginning, there is something like jealousy toward the
music after a while. It's difficult," Enya explained to
the Belfast Telegraph.
"I wouldn't change anything I've done over the past few
years. That I'm not married and don't have children has
been my choice. I don't feel I've missed out in any
way," Enya elaborated to The Guardian, going on to
describe how at school marriage was a common topic
among the girls, but for her, it was far less important
than her ambitions for success.
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of-enya/
Enya's brand of ethereal music may evoke thoughts or
feelings of being among nature. Some of her most
popular recordings actively encourage that idea, with
titles like "The Memory of Trees," "A Day Without
Rain," "Orinoco Flow," and "Caribbean Blue." That
alignment with the natural and scientific world,
coupled with the musician's international and enduring
popularity, has led to multiple discoveries being named
in honor of Enya.
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In 1978, astronomers identified a previously
undiscovered minor planet in our solar system,
initially given the classification number
6433, orbiting the sun as close as 173.6 million miles
away: In 1997, astronomer G.V. Williams renamed it
(6433) Enya. Twenty years later, researchers from
Oregon State University found a never-before-seen,
black-and-yellow-striped fish in the Orinoco River in
western South America. As a nod to Enya, performer of
the hit song "Orinoco Flow," the scientists named the
species Leporinus enyae, which translates to "beautiful
little fish."
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of-enya/
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