In this Great Music series, I’ve kind of bounced around different music genres. This week is no exception. I offer a musician who only needs one name, and everyone knows exactly who I am writing about, this week being about the world famous Eithne Padraigin Ni Bhraonain or as she is better known – Enya.
Since I first heard her sing I have been captured by the ethereal nature of her music. It has the mystical quality of her native Ireland. Anyone who has been to Ireland and looks out at the incredibly green hills almost instinctively thinks maybe the Garden of Eden is just beyond that next hill. To wander the hills and valleys of Ireland is almost a religious experience. The calm, color and age of everything brings our insignificant existence into perspective.
Enya was born in 1961 in County Donegal in Ireland’s north country, a gaelic speaking area of the country. She was raised in a musical family with both her mother and father playing in an Irish band. In the early 1980’s the family band toured Europe with Enya on the piano and backup vocals but Enya was not happy and wanted to concentrate on her own music. After writing some music for BBC series, she struck out on her own to record an album in 1987, simply called Enya, writing all the music. While achieving middling success she followed it up with an album called Watermark in 1988 and with this album became known around the world.
Since Watermark, she has recorded several new albums but mostly remembered for her music that was in the movie, Lord of the Rings. However, she has never duplicated the success of her early albums as she has gotten away from her Irish roots and tried to be more of a pop singer. She is a very private person and has never married. She now lives in a Castle she restored in Killiney Ireland still writing music and making an occasional appearance on television. To give you an idea of Enya’s music, I offer these three songs:
May It Be
So I Could Find My Way