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Eithne Ni Bhraonain - known as Enya -
was born in 1961, 17 May, and spent her childhood in
Gweedore (in County Donegal, situated in the
north-west of Ireland, one of the main redoubts of
the Irish language). There are nine brothers and
sisters. Apart from Enya, who is in the middle,
there are four other girls and four boys. All the
family have won many competitions and are famous in
national traditional [music] circles.
Whilst at school, Enya studied the piano and
classical music. Three of her brothers and sisters,
M醝re N?Bhraon醝n (Mary Brennan), Ciar醤
?Braon醝n (Kieran Brennan) and P髄
?Braon醝n (Paul Brennan) formed, together with
their uncles P醖raig ?Dug醝n (Patrick
Duggan) and Noel ?Dug醝n (Noel Duggan), a folk
music group (at first with a certain American feel
and then more purely Irish, though influenced by
jazz and by others such as Pentangle). The group was
named Clannad, a contraction of "the family
from Gweedore" in Irish. In 1980, at the
suggestion of their manager, Fachtna O'Kelly, Enya
became a member of the group, participating in the
recording of two of their albums, Crann Ull and
Fuaim. Apart from providing vocals, she played the
Wurlitzer electric piano and later the Prophet 5
synthesizer. She performed with Clannad on many
occasions, until, in February 1982, on completing a
European tour, she left the group, no one really
knowing why. Perhaps she was fed up with being
treated as just the little
Since then she has lived in Artane, in the north of
Dublin, sharing a house together with Nicky Ryan and
Roma, his wife, who comes from Belfast. All had been
involved with Clannad at some time. Nick Ryan had
worked as a sound engineer with Planxty and later
with Clannad, at the time the group was starting
out. In 1980, their manager, Fachtna O'Kelly, took
charge of the new group The Boomtown Rats, for which
reason Nicky thenceforth took charge of their
[Clannad's] work. In his house he installed a
recording studio, Aigle. There he has recorded, for
example, Christy Moore's album Ordinary Man, which
has three songs in which Enya takes part in the
chorus.
It was also Fachtna O'Kelly who suggested to Enya
after she left Clannad, that she devote herself to
composing for films. And so, in 1984, she approached
her first important task. Roma Ryan had sent a
cassette of Enya to film producer David Puttnam, who
already had to his credit such titles as Midnight
Express, Chariots Of Fire and Los Gritos Del
Silencio. Puttnam asked her to compose dreamy and
romantic music with a sixties feel for the feature
film The Frog Prince.
Having a studio at her disposal, Enya worked almost
always at home with the Roland Juno 60 synthesizer
or the Kurzweil sampler, and then added piano and
voice. Nicky Ryan recorded everything and helped to
put the compositions into their final form.
The next commission was for the BBC. It was to
prepare music for an important television
documentary series on the history of the Celtic
civilisation throughout its 2700 years. The series
was called The Celts. The composition took ten
months work. The music was liked so much that the
BBC decided to release a selection as an independent
record, before the series was broadcast and entitled
simply Enya, with barely a mention in the liner
notes that it was a soundtrack.
She played nearly all the instruments on the album,
sometimes doubling up as many as eighty voices to
create her characteristic sound, of dense textures,
and ethereal voices, dreamlike and enchanting. It
was to paint by means of synthesizers a modern sonic
landscape that could evoke different atmospheres,
from the mournful lament of 'Deireadh An Tuath' to
the striking 'Boadicea', with its astounding dynamic
of overdubbed voices. Nicky Ryan acted as producer
and co-author of the arrangements and his wife Roma
wrote nearly all the lyrics, for the most part
nearly inaudible or impenetrable, giving an
evanescent character to the music by being sung in
Latin, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.
Only on three of the pieces did other musicians take
part, one on each. Patrick Halling, a classical
violinist who frequently plays in recording sessions
for rock artists (Jethro Tull and Steve Howe, for
example), added delicate nuances to the final track.
The great piper Liam 觛 O'Floinn (or Liam
O'Flynn, founder member of Planxty and regular
collaborator of composer Shaun Davey) played the
melody part of 'The Sun In The Stream'. Lastly, the
guitarist Arty McGlynn (ex-member of Van Morrison's
band and of Planxty and current member of Patrick
Street) correspondingly completed with his elegant
flourishes the only song whose lyric was
comprehensible to us, being in English and sung
clearly, 'I Want Tomorrow'. It was, moreover, the
song chosen as a single and video (curiously, in the
video the guitar is not heard.)
This record subsequently climbed to number one in
the Irish charts, which started the commercial rise
of Enya. She collaborated with the singer Sin閍d
O'Connor reciting a short text on 'Never Get Old'
from her album The Lion And The Cobra.
She signed with an important multinational (WEA),
and had a resounding success with her second album
Watermark, which has passed 10 million sales
worldwide, and has gone platinum in 14 different
countries, helped by the single 'Orinoco Flow', a No
1 hit in Britain. Then she repeated her world
success with Shepherd Moons, which spent an amazing
199 weeks on the Billboard charts in the USA and has
sold over 11 million copies.
A new version of the album Enya was released as The
Celts and in 1995 with The Memory of Trees was yet
another smash hit album. Enya has been nominated for
four Grammy Awards and has won two, both for
"Best New Age Album", Shepherd Moons in
1992 and The Memory of Trees in 1997. Also in 1997
she released a compilation album titled Paint The
Sky With Stars that contained a selection of the
Enya better known themes and two new songs: 'Paint
The Sky With Stars' and 'Only If...' That year
itself came out A Box Of Dreams; a box set that
contained a three CD collection and an illustrated
booklet. The CDs were entitled Oceans, Clouds and
Stars, and they cover the Enya career since her
debut in 1987.
The artist spent the remainder of the decade
contributing soundtrack material to various
projects, before returning to the studio to record A
Day Without Rain, her first new studio album in five
years. Of this album she says, "The title
refers to the mood on a particularly peaceful day on
which there was no rain. We do get a lot of rain in
Ireland in all seasons. We had a run of days where
it had done nothing but rain. Then one day the sun
came out. It was then that I wrote the title track,
so what else could I call it?".
The album shot up the US and several European charts
almost a year after its release, thanks to the use
of the track "Only Time" in news coverage
of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
in New York.
Her music has appeared in many more smash hit films,
including "L.A. Story", "Green
Card", "Toys", the TomCruise/Nicole
Kidman film "Far and Away" and Martin
Scorcese's "Age Of Innocence". Enya's new
song 'Only Time' features in the film, "Sweet
November", starring Charlize Theron and Keanu
Reeves. In 2001 she records 2 brand new songs for
Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring
soundtrack, "Aniron (theme for Aragorn and
Arwen)" and "May It Be".
She has made appearances at benefits and has played
for the Pope, the King of Sweden and the Queen of
England, but these involved playbacks of her work
while she played and possibly sang along, not a true
live performance. "It抎 be a really great
thing to do,?Enya says of performing live. 揥e抳e
first been talking about next year, trying to at
least do a TV special performance, having the
setting, say, in a cathedral or something and
involve quite a few people - orchestrating the
music, having choir. It抎 be fantastic to try.
You can抰 emulate the same sound, but
definitely the music can cross over to a rendering
for a live performance. We抮e both very
confident about that.?/p>
In 2002 Enya got a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination
for "best original song" with "May It
Be". Wins a new Grammy Award for "Best New
Age Album" with A Day without Rain. Wins three
World Music Awards: "best-selling Female
artist", "best-selling New Age
artist" and "best-selling Irish
artist", and wins the award for "best
pop-rock single" with "Only Time" in
the Echo Awards (Germany)...
Although fronted by Enya, the music released under
her name is the result of collaboration between
three people: Enya, who sings, writes and performs
all the music, her producer, sound engineer and
co-arranger Nicky Ryan and his wife, lyricist Roma
Ryan. Enya has previously stated that without any
one of them, "Enya" would not exist.
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