Pure Enya

It’s 𝓟𝓾𝓻𝓮 𝓜𝓸𝓸𝓭𝓼 week at Dirt. Get caught up:

• Zach Schonfeld on Pure Moods and horror soundtracks

• Becca Schuh on Gregorian chants

• Molly Mary O’Brien on the odd song “Adiemus”

Today, Michelle Santiago Cortés writes about earnestness and Enya.

I’m not exactly sure how Enya reached me. I only remember that there was a time before Enya and a time after. I wasn’t old enough to have encountered her through late night television commercials or early aughts MTV. I doubt Puerto Rico was a key market for Gaelic ambient music; my local incense stores preferred playing reggae and Andalusian music. So it must have been the internet. In those days, I got at least half of my music from Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie and Enya is the exact kind of weird, witchy woman the site was known to champion. I listened to The Very Best of Enya in whole via YouTube, writing down the names of the songs I liked enough to add to my iTunes Library.

I remember hesitating to download my top three: “Only Time”, “Wild Child” and “Orinoco Flow.” I was studying for finals at my aunt’s house and she works for the Catholic church. I was already pushing my luck by reading Rookie on my study breaks and was paranoid that using youtube-to-mp3.com might be going too far. (I was eventually called to meet the priest, but for entirely unrelated reasons.) For weeks, all I did was loop those three songs. The poppy-red skirt from the cover art is etched into my brain. 

Sitting down with Enya’s music finally put a name to the sound. A sound I retroactively assign to things and places I think it might pair well with: My red Dell’s skeuomorphic interface and my iPod Touch’s backgrounds. The plug-in water fountain in the psychiatrist’s waiting room. If vaporwave is mall music, then Enya is the sound coming from the little room in the beauty salon where I got my brows waxed. 

Relative to her success, we know very little about Enya. She has sold over 80 million records, won four Grammys, and is Ireland’s most successful pop export, second only to U2. And she did this without ever going on tour. In contrast, most of what we know about Enya’s personal life we glean not from her music, but from her house. In 1996, her success bought her a Victorian castle just outside of Dublin for over £2 million. It houses the singer’s collection of first edition books and her signed photo of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. As part of its extensive renovation, Enya raised the height of the existing stone wall surrounding the castle.

What we have of Enya in abundance is her voice: Sumptuous layers, sometimes hundreds. Producer Nicky Roman overdubs Enya’s voice, as many as 500 takes recorded over the course of “weeks, or months, or even a year,” according to Pitchfork. He builds her voice up into a spire of sound, a “choir of one.” Her voice flies through the air in languages both dead (Latin) and fictional (Elvish, Loxian) in addition to English and Gaelic thanks to her lyricist Roma Ryan. Roma’s lyrics and Nicky’s production work like the ripples of light shining through undulating water. Enya sings from the bottom of the pool, shimmering through the layers of digital distortion.

In a 2017 interview for LitHub, Enya explained how she connects to her audience: “When talking to fans, I ask, ‘Does it matter that I’m singing in Gaelic or Latin or the different languages?’ And they say, ‘No, no, no’; they sense the emotional feeling within my performance, within the melody.” In 2001, CBS Sunday Morning described her sound as “wind chimes with words.” The actual words have been demonstrated to be of little consequence. As a result, Enya’s crystal shop genericism was often counted against her. And as an over-correction, later music critics from Pitchfork to NPR have argued that to think of her music in such a way is a gross dismissal of a talented woman’s work. But I say it’s her best quality. 

You can’t listen to Enya ironically or use her as a shorthand for an elite sense of taste. Enya’s blandness creates a vacuum that only rewards earnest enjoyment. When academic burnout fixed my gaze to the condensed water sliding down the side of a glass of lemonade, “Wild Child” made it easier to blink. It’s a weird and misshapen affinity. “Only Time” moved me to awkward poems about cold grass and morning dew. These songs turned hours of homework into virtuous study sessions atop castle towers full of doves with papers swirling in the winds of a tired imagination.

In a similar way, Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You carried me through last spring. As I was reading through her interviews I saw how often she cited Enya. I had not listened to Enya since I was struggling through high school, but I looked her up on Spotify and started from the beginning: 1987’s The Celts. I added “Fairytale” to a playlist called thaw that included Yves Tumor’s “Limerence” and Björk’s “Possibly Maybe.” I have a bad habit of forgetting to feel my feelings and this playlist is a helpful reminder.

By summer 2023, I had worked my way through her discography and I was looping 1991’s Shepherd Moon. I was pressing seaweed from Rockaway Beach to ward off an oncoming wave of depression and made my specimens dance in their water dish to “Caribbean Blue.” I pretended my apartment was at the bottom of a lagoon. The fantasies I summon through Enya’s music are like her, weird and generic. They are fantasies I only have while listening to Enya, fantasies I don’t care to revisit often, fantasies that are born and buried within the span of a listening session. Fantasies I, nevertheless, have come to rely on.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• “Laptops as party favors? Check. Cavernous, nearly-empty offices? Check. I knew on my first day that The Messenger was a money incinerator, and not destined to last.” (Defector)

• The longtime Hollywood gossip blogger behind “Crazy Days and Nights” has been unmasked (The Daily Beast)

• A new song from Chanel Beads (Spotify)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Grace Byron on the present tense of trans fiction (Baffler)

• On data centers in Ireland (The Dial)

• “Nothing rings true, or rather, nothing feels true…” New Gary Indiana (Granta)

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