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05/17/2025

Today’s blog

Lynn Murphy Mark

Enya

The other day we were at a friend’s house for coffee. She had soft music playing in the background, and I recognized it as a collection of Mozart pieces. When I mentioned it and said I love Mozart, she said, “You know who else I love? Enya!”. The next thing I knew, Alexa was playing a string of Enya classics. Now, my playlists on iTunes are loaded with favorites that I have downloaded/bought over quite a few decades. I used to move around accompanied by a huge folio of music CD’s.

About 5 of those CD’s were Enya’s. Over time, I have gotten rid of the CD folio and relied on iTunes on my computer. Somehow, Enya’s music never got loaded into any previous versions of Macintosh laptops. That surprises me because I am a big fan of this Irish songstress and composer. Her music is characterized by a whole lot of layering of her voice to produce gorgeous harmonies of herself singing with herself. 

Off to iTunes I went and bought two of her albums that I used to own. Now I have an Enya playlist, relatively inexpensive at this time due to how long she has been around. What is cool is that today is her 64^th birthday. I just gave her a few pennies in royalties for her big day.

She was born Eithne Padraigin Ni Bhraonain. In our speak that becomes Enya Patricia Brennan. I’ll have to get my Irish friend Mary to say that in Irish. It turns out that she is the best selling music act from Ireland, second only to U2. She has sold around 90 million albums making her a wildly successful “New Age” artist. She also owns four Grammy Awards, and is the most nominated female Irish artist in British musical awards history.

My only connection with her, besides my admiration, is that she was born in County Donegal, Ireland. I have been there with my kids to visit a small town where one of our ancestors is buried. We also had lunch at a pub in town. Lunch consisted of some food and big glasses of that dark rich Guiness beer. Guiness almost counts as lunch by itself, but we felt we had to accompany it with some actual food.

Enya’s music speaks to me. I love the gentle harmonies she creates by layering tracks of her voice. I listened to her a lot in the 1990’s and 2000’s, often using her music to center me when I was cutting glass for my stained glass projects. To me, this music opens up some creative pathway that leads to a feeling of belonging in the flow of energy from the Universe. I spent a lot of hours interacting with her music and with sheets of colored glass, steering the glass cutter in difficult curves and angles. 

She was one of nine children, born to people with a musical bent. She tells the story that there was “continual hustle and bustle and crying and chaos” in her house. She was fine with that because it meant she could be relatively invisible and left to her own devices. I’ll bet that the quiet nature of her music has something to do with escaping the chaos of her childhood. 

She has continued her search for privacy by being an actual recluse. She lives in a big Victorian mansion where she can be relatively alone to compose. She is wealthy, in fact her fortune in female musician UK terms is second only to that of Adele. She has never been on tour, so there’s no need for me to check out her performance schedule. I am content to hear her through my ear buds. I love the interior calm of her music.