Enya is a leveller. From school teachers to bank executives, from dance instructors to postmen: they might disagree on much else, but none will fail to appreciate Enya – her lucent mulitracked voice, her lyrical fantasies, her synthesized orchestral tones.
If you’re Irish and over a certain age, there’s another element – nostalgia. Weren’t times simpler and less stressful back in 1988, when Orinoco Flow simultaneously struck the top of the UK and the Irish charts, giving the nation a moment of collective pride?
Enya is the ostensible focus of this essay-length book by the pianist Chilly Gonzales. Subtitled A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures, the book uses Enya as a prism for issues concerning how we use music to define ourselves. In other words, it’s less a scholastic treatise than a book-length essay, mixing personal and critical perspectives in an engaging, entertaining way.
On the face of it, Enya and Chilly Gonzales aren’t the most likely bedfellows. Gonzales is famed for his piano recitals, taking in everything from Chopin to Soundgarden, and for collaborating with Daft Punk and Peaches. Enya stands for dreamy reflection; Gonzales, for glitzy showbiz. But ours is the age of unlikely guest features – McGregor and Mayweather, Kanye and Trump, RuPaul and AOC – so the coupling makes as much or as little sense as anything else.
Clannad roots
In an interview with RTÉ News after she scored that first UK number 1, Enya talked about her chart success using the pronoun “us” rather than “me”. This wasn’t celebrity false modesty. Her solo career was a group project, her persona co-sculpted with her production and management team, Nicky and Roma Ryan.
My parents remember seeing Clannad at the Highlands Hotel in Glenties in the early 1980s. While the rest of the group took centre stage, a slight figure was visible, shunted to the side: their little sister. My mother, who knows the family, felt sorry for the awkward young girl. Evidently Enya wasn’t so happy either; in a later interview, she mentioned “little sister syndrome” in describing how she was treated by her sibling bandmates.
Some have suggested that this dissatisfied younger sister was tapped up by Clannad’s management as a potential vehicle for a more ambitious pop project. They had a word in Enya’s ear, it’s said, and from one day to the next Clannad found itself without a manager and without their little sister.
For the next few years, drawing on and developing the electronic ideas Clannad had begun exploring, Enya was groomed for pop stardom; and when it arrived, it arrived spectacularly (80 million albums sold to date). Nowadays, if I go to midnight Mass at Christmas with my mother, I sometimes see her singing in the church choir.
Gonzales isn’t interested in any of this historical or biographical stuff. His book is divided into three sections – Lullaby Voice, Unguilty Pleasures and Saying No. Each explores a critical perspective on Enya and pop and his own musical development, along the way throwing in random observations and hot takes.
Unproduced lullaby
Lullaby Voice sets the spontaneous, unstudied feeling of a mother singing a lullaby against the contrivance of a produced pop song. “A lullaby, in fact, is pure melody, the voice itself,” Gonzales says; then he proceeds to think through what this means, taking us from A-ha to Frank Sinatra to his early jazz musician snobbery. Eventually, he arrives at a realisation: “I know that when I listen to Enya, I imagine myself a baby, being lulled to sleep by an Irish fairy princess. She is ethereal, pure, but more than that, she is our good mother, and she wants us to know that everything will be okay.”
It’s a striking observation, and it’s the tone of informality that makes it work. Reading this book feels like talking to someone in a bar at four in the morning, someone wise enough to know that music is less a matter of formality than of feeling.
Gonzales discusses musical taste. For many, Enya should be considered as pleasant but not as “historically important” as, say, Prince. That’s why liking Enya, or whatever other such things we might like, remains a guilty pleasure. But when we embrace guilty pleasures, Gonzales says, we realise that taste is “essentially asking permission to put [your] own twist on musical history”.
This seems quite profound. Through our likes and dislikes we take ownership over history, curating our own canon. (Gods make their own importance and all that.) By contrast, “consensus thinking is for rule-followers and sheep who have no mind of their own”. It’s liberating to like the music you like: it’s “the original score to the movie of [your] life”.
My only issue with this book is that it’s too short. You’ll read it in an afternoon. I would have read something 10 times as long in Gonzales’s witty, passionate voice – less the voice of a lullaby than of a friend.
