Light sparkle against an ominous sky. Figures emerge from the battered urban landscape, picked out as if by a movie camera, their presence suddenly dignified with a significance that normally escapes us. This comes as a revelation, this feeling of connectedness, flowing from the music on the stereo.
A delicate keyboard sounds, a bank of voices reverbed up to 20, a haunting melody asserts itself and percussion crashes - and all the minor dramas suddenly come into focus. Behind the wheel of one car a love story is beginning And all around, hearts beat, hearts beat Later there is just the windswept streets, the odd broken reveller staggering home, and a sad piano refrain playing on the spirit.
Tonight you will go to bed and dream of ebb and flow; sea waves dancing against imaginary rocks, hear water hiss and sigh on anonymous beaches and feel again the power of the deep and its magnetic appeal. And you will know that journeys must always end and that there will be a here where they do and a when - and that someone else in the future will try to unlock the doors of their own past and say Speak Memory.
And that if they're lucky the chords will reverberate and the waves will rise up and they too will feel part of the whole, reaching backwards and forwards across generations, beyond the past and into the future. And you will wake up knowing that something special is happening here, and no mistake. Trying to define just what its is, is a little more elusive, Mr. Out in the undistinguished suburb of Artane, you knock on a door like ten thousand other doors stretching back towards Fairview or onwards to Raheny.
You're led in through an ordinary three up two down hall, into a simple suburban kitchen. But things begin to get somewhat strange when you realise that the building doesn't end here. To the left you enter a passageway and walk undercover - down the garden - towards a small door. Open this and you're inside a perfectly self-contained and attractively isolated recording studio. You could live here for months on end, burrowing away at songwriting and recording, and no one would know.
Tonight, however, is listen-back time and an opportunity to hear Watermark , the new album by Enya, in optimum circumstances. Nicky Ryan is at the controls, talking ten to the dozen as he cues up tracks, as if a dam has broken, and the flood of words he's been holding back for the best part of two years can finally flow free. It's heading on for midnight already and suffused almost in darkness - a sense which is enhanced by the mercurial flickering of console lights - and enveloped in a pervasive surrounding quiet, the music takes on a profundity I hadn't anticipated.
There is nothing here about the trivial concerns of conventional pop: no boy meets girl, no flimsy professions of undying love, no waking up the morning after and realising that it wasn't all just a bad dream. This music aspires towards a deeper impact, exploring moods, textures and memories in a way that draws in the subconscious and invites us to paint our own pictures. It is music which encompasses the Holy trinity of creative endeavour: intellect, emotion and imagination. It's light on that other vital element, celebration, but no matter.
What it offers is enough to be getting on with, the product of a labour of love involving another kind of trinity -- a collaborative one, between Enya, Nicky and their other partner-in-crime, Roma Ryan. It is the extraordinary, fortuitous nature of this harmony of seeming opposites which gives what's happening in this Artane studio tonight its special strength. Enya writes the melodies, the bare bones on which the others' creative contributions hang.
Nicky, a sound engineer of twenty years standing, and a producer with an ear for the big statement, fills in the sonic context, layering keyboard on top of keyboard, and vocal track on top of vocal track on top of vocal track -- a painstaking crafting of sound waves that can run to 80 overdubs.
Along the way, a title is established and Roma goes to work sketching in allusive, evocative lyrics that direct the music further into the mystic. As the night draws on we talk about forgotten places, altered states, other worlds. About self-induced deafness, hypnotism, healing, and re-living traumatic experiences.
About Belfast, visitations, the Church of Psychic Science and mediums. About re-incarnation, and children and death and spirits watching over us. About dreams, and the past and dreams and the future - and just plain dreams. It's the kind of terrain into which Watermark draws you, the pull of which only the most stubborn materialist could resist.
But going home I'm thinking not so much of the power of dreams as of the question of packaging and selling them. And wondering not only if the marketplace can take the weight of this particular dream-sequence but also what the beast of commerce might do with the dreams it's entrusted with. Fate and circumstance. Enya had written the music for the IRMA awards show a couple of years ago.
Yea, Cali is not "below the Coral Sea", but how many people knew that? Yea, it's not on the coast either, but at least you can sail there by boat along the river. The big craters in the moon are called seas, because in the past they thought they contained water.
Madagascar is a big island off the eastern coast of south Africa. In this case, it is the wheel of the sheep, used to guide it. This line of the song "Ross and his dependencies" is a little joke, since Ross is the name of the co-producer of this song. This song is a fantasy trip in exotic faraway lands, evoking real locations and also legendary ones, which helps destroy the border between reality and fantasy, turning the whole thing into a dreamy state of mind.
The Orinoco is a tributary of the Amazon river, and flows across Venezuela's rain forest. Roma, the lyricist for Enya, chose this river because they were recording this album in the Orinoco Studios in London. There are two more references to the studios in the song, near the end. The resulting score, by James Horner, sounds an awful lot like Enya. But we may now be living in an Enya-ssaince.
I love her so much. In the coming-of-age film Eighth Grade , it plays over a montage of Kayla Elsie Fisher sailing on the high seas of social media. He wrote a letter to Enya asking for permission to use the song, which must have been a refreshing request after all of those sarcastic needle-drops over the years. For Burnham, the song felt religious. Find him at timgreiving. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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