Everyone knows how to get to Enya’s castle. At least everyone in Killiney, the sloping, oceanside village 45 minutes out of Dublin. Walk past a massive public park, where paths thread by a resting quarry and an obelisk, erected in 1740 to distract the Irish peasants from the hard year that had come before. From there, it’s a quick stroll down the road, past the groundskeeper’s cottage that’s now a coffee shop, and through a stone gate that narrows an already spindly road.
Here, you’ll pass clumps of walkers taking the air, most with golden retrievers, all with sturdy anoraks in sensible colors. Those walkers don’t pause when they pass the place in the eight-foot stone wall where a legit turret peeks over massive wooden gates — where, if you look closely, you can see the seam in the stone wall where Enya added four additional feet of height when she moved in back in the late ‘90s. Surveillance cameras eye and remind: Enya does not accept visitors unbidden.
The castle is small, as castles go, just six bedrooms. But when Enya moved in, she redid them all. And the bathrooms, which she’s filled with Lalique glass — a word she pronounces like it were a bonbon melting on her tongue. Her bedroom has no curtains, just shutters, and when she opens them each morning, the Irish sea sprawls out before her. There’s the Wicklow Mountains in one direction, and Dalkey Island, where the mystical stones of the druids still mystify, in the other. “I open those shutters, and the sea, it’s different ev-er-y day,” she says. “It’s very inspiring to me. I just look at the view, and if it’s overcast and raining, no matter: I never tire of it.” Her bedroom, Enya tells me, is her favorite room.
Traditionally, castles were passed through family lines. Enya — whose wealth is estimated at $136 million, about double that of Chris Martin — bought her own. But unlike her neighbor Bono, whose income stems from massive world tours, Enya does not, and has never, toured. She submits to minimal press. She takes up to seven years between albums. Yet she has sold a total of 80 million records, and is one of a dwindling group whose records people are willing to buy.
Her success so deeply contradicts accepted industry wisdom that it’s inspired a term — “Enya-nomics” — to describe it. Several years ago, she was invited to Harvard Business School to discuss the subject, but, like most invitations, Enya declined. Her underexposure, after all, is at the heart of both Enya-nomics and her appeal. Unlike other local celebrities — Bono, The Edge, Van Morrison, Pierce Brosnan, director Neil Jordan — who’ll make odd appearances at the local establishment, Enya is seldom seen outside the walls of her castle. One shopkeeper claims to have seen a woman matching her description in a tracksuit, but the idea of Enya in a tracksuit boggles the mind. No one knows much about her private life, save that she’s close to her family, hasn’t been married, and enjoys old Hollywood.
There are no photos of Enya in pants, or without the makeup that emphasizes her alabaster skin and dark, pooling eyes. Her look, like her sound, is markedly different from the norms of musical celebrity: her pitch black hair trimmed short, her clothes Arthurian. On her album covers, Enya’s always posed against a backdrop of nature or old regency; the cover of her 1988 breakthrough album Watermark renders her the subject of an Impressionist painting.
Enya's estate, Manderley.
Her look, like her sound, seems to exist outside of time. In her songs, there are no references to objects, technological or otherwise: just emotions, swells, landscapes, time. In her real life, she checks her email once every few weeks, and even then, very quickly. “It feels so cold,” she says, making a face like she’d bitten into a lemon. “The energy is no good. I’d rather go for a walk.”
It is as if a woman of the 18th century, renowned for her beauty and voice, was transplanted to the present, where she would sell as many albums as Beyoncé and baffle all industry experts. She transcends centuries, but she also exceeds hierarchies of cool. Her style has been derogatorily described as muzak or New Age — the aural approximation of a warm bath — but might be more fairly described as ancient choral music on synth steroids.
Enya, for her part, describes her genre of music as “Enya.” It’s played at weddings. It’s in car commercials. It made the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” feel like an incantation. It’s perfect at Christmas. After 9/11, it was all over CNN. People probably don’t have much sex to Enya, but women have assuredly orgasmed to it. It’s at once stunningly flexible and spectacularly safe.
Enya is basic, which is to say, she’s elemental: sacred without religion. And as she prepares to release her eighth studio album — and first in seven years — the conversation isn’t about reinventing herself for the digital age, or “Enya’s Second Act.” Her career is like a continuously held note: a single tone, but a rich one, shielded, at least to this point, from the vagaries of the age and industry. Which isn’t to say it’s been easy. It’s taken years of work — of carefully cultivated mystery, of continuous self-effacement — for Enya to feel this inevitable and eternal. For her to become not just an artist, but an adjective.
Photographed exclusively for BuzzFeed News in London on Nov. 16.
Charlie Gray for BuzzFeed News
That’s the feel of the listening party for the new album, Dark Sky Island, held on a blustery day in October: very Enya. Warner Bros. Records, her label since the days of “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” is throwing an event that makes you feel like CDs are selling for $17.99 apiece all over again. Even the invitation, which promises “canapés,” feels like a throwback. It’s at an Upper East Side marbled mansion, with a spiraling marble staircase that, as you ascend, reveals Enya’s name projected on the ceiling above. The crowd skews young and hip — a mix of music journalists and Warner employees flown in for the occasion. One, in his late thirties, tells me that seeing Enya has been his life’s dream: “I’ve seen Cher and Adam Lambert, so now I’ve seen them all.”
Clustered at small cocktail tables, everyone’s invited to turn off cell phones so as to “replicate the experience” of the locale invoked by the album — a real island, Sark, off the coast of France, where the 600 residents have committed to emitting no light pollution. People start closing their eyes, trance-like — even the journalists with the coolest hair — and get that softened look people get in their faces when watching a wedding, or a sunset. The "Enya" look.
When the intro to “Echoes in Rain” plays, the exec sitting in front of me goes nuts, in a subdued, candle-lit way. “This is the shit!” he whisper-shouts. Then there’s a ballad, “So I Could Find My Way,” that a journalist will later tell Enya will be perfect for a breakup scene in a rom-com, and “Sancta Maria,” the sort of escalating march to which my brother and I would’ve made an intricately choreographed dance when we were 6 and 9.
An exec from Warner Music UK comes out and effuses about Enya and her 80 million records. When he mentions that Enya’s one of the only artists who’s been on their roster since the ‘80s, it’s with gratitude, tinged with just the slightest bit of desperation. And while her albums have performed well (A Day Without Rain sold 15 million and became the fifth biggest international album of 2001; Amaratine, released in 2005, sold 6.5 million copies; her Christmas album, And Winter Came, sold 3 million in 2008) the numbers for Dark Sky Island won't be what they used to be, even for an artist whose core audience might still buy CDs. For the first time, Enya is talking publicly, and seriously, about the idea of a tour.
In the meantime, she's adapting to this new landscape. A 2013 Volvo ad with Jean-Claude Van Damme featuring her 2000 single "Only Time" has been viewed 81 million times on YouTube and launched the song back into Billboard's Hot 100 over a decade after its initial release. The song has 36 million streams on Spotify, where Enya's artist channel has 1.2 million monthly listeners; there's a reliable market for music that can meld so seamlessly into the background.
"In the next year you'll start to see all kinds of usages for the songs on Dark Sky Island," says Dion Singer, executive vice-president of creative at Warner Bros. "It's all about finding ways of exposing her music while being absolutely aware that it needs to keep the elegance and respect of her compositions. We can also see how being in films and commercials kept her music so front of mind. It's exciting when you see how many people stream her entire catalog every week and the different kinds of playlists she ends up on."
Enya emerges from the shadows wearing a full-length black taffeta dress and a velvet shrug. She’s 54, but she has the skin of someone much younger — or someone who spends most of her time in an Irish castle. She looks like a mix of Deanna Troi and my mom, which is to say, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She appears, nods as the room applauds her, and disappears without a word. “Now, for a light mingle,” the exec announces.
In the next room, Enya has a receiving line, like a bride all in black. Everyone has a story to tell her: Here is what you mean to me; here is where your music made room in my life. “Was that a harpsichord I heard on ‘Sancta Maria’?” someone asks. “Oh, we never reveal our secrets,” she says, with a half-smile.
She’s referring to the work of the so-called “triad” that make up Enya, the musical entity. Enya conjures the melodies; husband-and-wife team Nicky and Roma Ryan are responsible for the production (him) and lyrics (her). Nicky Ryan is a student of Phil Spector’s famed “wall of sound” school of production, and applies the same principle to each of Enya’s songs, layering her voice up to 500 times, then adding in a mix of instruments, some of which Enya plays and others he’s sampled. Nicky and Roma go everywhere that Enya goes, and they’re here at the listening party, holding court, flanking her during the dinner party and staying even after Enya glides away before the dessert course arrives.
I ask the twentysomething waiter if he’d ever heard of Enya. He pauses, looks over at a poster of her face on the wall, and says, “That’s her song in that car commercial with Van Damme, right?”
Enya, born Eithne Ni Bhraonáin, grew up in the Northwest corner of Ireland in a town called Gweedore, in County Donegal. “There’s the mountains, the bitter Atlantic, and that’s it,” Enya explains. Her father led a band before opening up the family pub; her mother was a piano teacher, but had little time to teach Enya, the sixth of nine children. She grew up speaking Gaelic and was regularly summoned — at family gatherings, at the pub, wherever — to sing in front of crowds. “At 3 years of age, I used to go to singing competitions,” she says. “And part of the competition would be for the whole family, and we’d have to sing harmonies after hearing a song once. I never found it strange.”
Enya was in the deep middle of the birth order. “Let’s say there’d be a question like ‘Will we go to the pictures today?’" Enya recalls. “What chance did I have to say yes or no?” At this, she laughs: It’s not a point of resentment. “By the time it came down to number five, — that’s me — it was just like, Here we go. It was difficult to be heard, but I was very comfortable with that because I was able to be myself, able to be let alone.” Enya taught herself to play the piano on her own, borrowing her mother’s instructional books, leading herself through the levels. “I got the duets, and I asked my sister to play a bit, and she’d refuse. I’d say, ‘I’ll give you my sweets for a week if you play it!’”
Gweedore, County Donegal, Ireland.
DeAgostini / Getty Images
Growing up amid The Troubles, she learned to live with the quiet terrors of everyday life. The “six counties” occupied by Britain separated Enya’s hometown from Dublin, and her family was regularly pulled over and searched on the way and back. “You’d go into a shop in Derry and you’d be checked by people standing with guns,” Enya says. “And my family, we’d have to be careful speaking Gaelic: If you did, you were pinpointing where you came from, and it was too political at the time. Whereas for us, it was our first language, and we didn’t see anything wrong with it.”
As a child, Enya had resigned herself to attending the local school, which lacked a music program. A nearby boarding school did, but the family was already paying for private school for three of Enya’s siblings. “I thought, Oh well, it’s not possible to send us all. But I was very close to my granddad and grandma, and they took me there one day and showed me around, and asked if I’d like to go. There was choir, and there was music, and at the time I was reading Malory Towers and all the boarding school books, and I just thought it was going to be all midnight feasts — I was over the moon.”
At this, Enya gets the sort of look on her face that former campers do when describing their childhood summers. “Parents ask me, ‘I don’t know whether to send my kid to boarding school,’ and I say, 'It’s either for you or it’s not.' And it was definitely, definitely for me.”
Meanwhile, three of Enya’s siblings and twin uncles were in a band, Clannad, that was starting to receive notice in Ireland. Nicky was their manager, and listened closely when Enya’s sister, Maire, told him about Enya’s incredible vocal range. “I knew what she could be,” he says, admitting that Enya’s beauty was part of the equation. When Nicky clashed with others in the group over their drinking, Enya had a choice. “Stay with us or be famous or go with him and be nothing,” the ultimatum supposedly went. Enya went with Nicky — and watched as Clannad’s popularity exploded in 1982, when “Theme from Harry’s Game,” sung entirely in Gaelic, became an international hit.
Noel Duggan, Ciaran Brennan, Moya Brennan, Padraig Duggan, and Paul Brennan of Clannad.
Mccarthy / Getty Images
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