Enya

Enya forged an original sound through the fusion of traditional folk melodies, electronic textures, and classical flourishes, yielding a result that aligned more closely with new age than with the folk and Celtic traditions that first shaped her work. Raised in Gweedore, County Donegal, Ireland, she departed in 1980 to become a member of the Irish band Clannad, already including several of her older siblings. After two years she exited the group and began working with producer Nicky Ryan and lyricist Roma Ryan on music for film and television, producing a well-received BBC collection of television scores. She next issued Watermark (1988), whose signature flowing arrangements and heavily overdubbed, hypnotic vocals helped the album reach eight million copies globally and established her as an international artist whose career extended well into the new millennium.

Born Eithne Ní Bhraonáin into a musical household, she grew up with a father, Leo Brennan, who led the popular Irish show band Slieve Foy Band, and a mother who played music as an amateur. Her siblings proved especially influential, forming Clannad in 1970 together with several uncles; Enya entered the ensemble on keyboards in 1980 and added to several of its well-known television soundtracks. She departed in 1982, stating a lack of interest in the pop trajectory the band had started to embrace. Soon afterward she was asked, alongside Nicky Ryan and Roma Ryan, to compose the score for the BBC-TV series The Celts, which appeared as her self-titled debut solo album in 1986.

Although that record drew limited attention, the trio’s follow-up, Watermark, emerged as an unexpected success in 1988. Enya maintained a low profile in the ensuing years, her most visible contribution being a guest spot on Sinéad O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. She returned in 1991 with Shepherd Moons, an album that surpassed its predecessor commercially by selling more than ten million copies worldwide, debuted at number 17 on the U.S. charts, and stayed in the Top 200 for nearly four years.

She again took an extended period to prepare her fourth album, Memory of Trees, which arrived in December 1995. It entered the U.S. charts at number nine and moved more than two million units in its first year. Two years later she released the greatest-hits set Paint the Sky with Stars: The Best of Enya, containing two newly recorded tracks. Her first collection of original material in five years, Day Without Rain, appeared in late 2000. In 2001 she supplied music to Peter Jackson’s award-winning Lord of the Rings film series and scored a hit with the single “May It Be.” Amarantine, her first full-length studio album since Day Without Rain, followed in November 2005. A holiday EP titled Christmas Secrets surfaced in 2006, succeeded by the all-original seasonal album And Winter Came in 2008.

Her second compilation, The Very Best of Enya, came out in 2009, yet six further years passed before her next studio release. “Echoes in Rain,” the first of two singles from her eighth album, surfaced in September 2015; the typically private artist granted numerous interviews and received her first substantial social-media campaign. Crafted once more with Roma and Nicky Ryan, Dark Sky Island appeared that November.