Here & There August 2008
By James Kullander
I’ve a confession to make: I love Enya. I can hardly leave home without her. Whenever I go on the road, I take her along. Over the years, she’s come with me to Nepal, Thailand, Italy, Ireland (where she lives), and on long drives up and down the highways that line the eastern seaboard like veins on the back of a hand, from Florida to Nova Scotia, past shopping malls and the sea, cornfields and landfills, freight yards and backyards, factories and farms.
For me, traveling is just as much about seeing the sites as it is looking within. The open road is a path to the soul. I listen to Enya to bring me there. Of all the hundreds of CDs I have—from Smashing Pumpkins to Arvo Pärt—I often listen to the same Enya CD over and over again. Sometimes the same song over and over again. And never tire of it. I feel she knows me better than I know myself. She says in so many ways what I long to say but don’t know how to say. Or to feel but not always allow myself to feel. Like she can read my mind and heart, and play it back to me, even if no words are involved. Sometimes, the more I listen to her, the more I hear, the words and notes like ladder rungs, leading me into the depths of myself, bringing ever more meaning to my experiences year after year after year.
Will you find the answer
in all you say and do?
Will you find the answer
in you?
I was introduced to Enya one wintry day in December of 1990 when I heard the 1988 CD Watermark, her first big hit (she produced a previous album, Enya, whose sales were relatively small). I’d just begun working for Omega that winter, and from the moment the melodious melodies of Watermark tiptoed like a warm breath into my ears from an office down the hall, I was in love. I was a little lost in my life then. I remember sometimes feeling like I’d found myself bored at a party full of people I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, and I had no ride home. At the same time I was lifting the veil on some spiritual yearnings I’d been sensing. Enya became a sort of guide in this new world I longed for but could hardly identify. And she attuned me to the idea that life can be rich and beautiful no matter where I am or what I am doing, even if—or especially if—I am lost and having a tough time. Stuck in my life or stuck in traffic. Even the slippery slopes of self-loathing, regret, loss, fear, and dark moods are easier rides with the music of Enya coursing through me.
I’ve been reading a 2006 book, This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. In it he writes: “To a certain extent, we surrender to music when we listen to it—we allow ourselves to trust the composers and musicians with a part of our hearts and our spirits; we let the music take us somewhere outside of ourselves. Many of us feel that great music connects us to something larger than our own existence, to other people, or to God.” This is what I feel when I listen to Enya. Is it “great” music? That’s a matter of opinion. As Duke Ellington once said: “If it sounds good and feels good, then it is good.” Enya sounds and feels good to me.
I remember in the summer of 1999, when I was traveling solo through Israel, I had accommodations in a hostel in Jerusalem’s Old City. One night I snuck out onto the flat roof overlooking in the distance the gigantic Church of the Holy Sepulcher (one of the most revered buildings are earth since it is built on the grounds of where most of Christendom believes Jesus was crucified and buried), al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third most holy site), and the Western Wall (the last remaining remnant of Solomon’s Temple and sacred to Jews for more than 2,000 years). Here were three of the most holy sites of three of the West’s greatest religions, all of them just about bumping up against one another and locked in bitter disputes over the years, like badly behaved siblings. After a long day of seeing those sites on the ground in the punishing Judean heat, exhausted and despairing over the centuries of religious hatred that has blighted the city, I slipped on my headphones, clicked on my Walkman, and listened to Enya’s “Book of Days.” The music sounded like it was coming from inside my head. And I found myself dancing, momentarily reconciled with this bewildering world all around me, arms out, face turned to the clear desert sky so thick with stars they too could have come from inside my head. Perhaps I was seeing the synapses in my brain sparking. I was euphoric about something I could not even name. A famous Buddhist chant, the Heart Sutra, ends with the lines describing the moment of awakening: “Gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond.” That’s what I felt like I’d gotten a glimpse of. Sometime after that trip I realized that the rhythm of a section of Enya’s “Book of Days” bears a haunting resemblance to that of the Heart Sutra.
No day, no night, no moment,
Can hold me back from trying.
I’ll fly, I’ll fall, I’ll falter,
I’ll find my day may be,
Far and away,
Far and away.
I like Enya best when I am in my car, even if I am only heading across town to the local Hannaford’s. To me, her lilting voice and seamless synthesizer orchestrations are emblematic of motion, and it’s when I am driving around that her songs resonate most deeply within me. The enigmatic aspect of life and its vast possibilities I feel from listening to her correspond to the ever-changing view of what’s in front of me. And I never know what’s around the corner even just down the road. It might be difficult. But it’s all right, because I’ll be a better, wiser person for remaining open to whatever is ahead. And there’s always something ahead (even if it feels like it’s sneaked up from behind). That’s what Enya says to me. She sings of the enigma of arrival. I sometimes think that Enya’s music has such wide appeal because wandering, longing, and searching is what we all do throughout much of our lives no matter where we are, even if we’re just staring out the kitchen window and going somewhere in the movie of our mind. One writer on the e-zine Slate writes: “To call Enya’s music ‘cinematic’ is an understatement—nearly every song plays like the soundtrack for a majestic film montage, with the camera swooping from lush green valleys to craggy coastlines and upward, zipping past mountain peaks, punching through cloud cover, soaring into the blue and beyond, to touch the face of God, or Gandalf.”
Of the many Enya CDs I have, my favorite is Shepherd Moons, Enya’s second international hit. An Entertainment Weekly reviewer once wrote that “Shepherd Moons just won’t leave you alone.” It holds a place in my memory like my first kiss. I remember that kiss well, and sometimes go way back there in my mind if for no other reason than for the memory of the pure, simple pleasure of being young and naïve and happy. I was on the verge of entering adolescence and the adult world, which would for me become more complicated and laborious than anything I could have imagined as a shy boy of 13. Years later when I first heard Enya, I was no longer young or naïve or all that happy, and I believe it was in part for my lost happiness that her music appealed to me then. Enya made me feel happy again. I suppose a part of me likes Enya because she takes me back in my mind to a simpler time when traveling light—that is, without much emotional baggage—was possible. Or perhaps it’s not so much about not having any emotional baggage but feeling lighter despite it. Enya helps to show me the way to embrace and establish harmony with the deepest currents of my fate. The Entertainment Weekly reviewer writes: “Her music may be escapist, but sorrow, loss, and displacement are lurking around the corner—often just like in life itself.”
Looking back at my youth
I was content
Without dead knowledge
I was young, without time….
When I like musicians or writers or artists, I like to follow their careers, get to know a little about them. I have noted all the Grammy Awards Enya has been piling up, the movie soundtracks she’s been hired to do (she turned down the opportunity to do the soundtrack for The Titanic), and even the college honorary degrees she has received. I’ve learned that her voice, which lured me from the start, is classified as a mezzo-soprano with an alto range, which she records in layers as many as eighty times for one song. One reviewer calls her a “sonic architect.” Her signature sound is produced with the help a Roland D-50 synthesizer, made by the Japanese company that also produced one of the first programmable drum machines. She sings many of her songs in Irish or Latin. On Amarantine, she even sings in Japanese and Loxian, a language invented by her lyricist Roma Ryan. Enya has also sung songs written entirely or partially in Welsh, Spanish, French, and even two languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his novels, including “May It Be” (in Quenya with some English), and “Aníron” (in Sindarin), both of which she composed for and performed on the soundtrack of Peter Jackson’s movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. She was born Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin on May 17, 1961 in Gaoth Dobhair, County Donegal, Ireland, and is now Ireland’s best-selling solo artist and the country’s second biggest musical export, second only to U2. A fan-based website, enyafans.net, offers information in fourteen languages, including Chinese, Lithuanian, and Persian.
When anyone is in my car with me and Enya is on or I find myself talking about her, I feel a little conflicted, like I’m not supposed to admit how much I like her music. I would never hide the fact that I love Led Zeppelin or Third Eye Blind to the point where I’ve given myself a permanent case of tinnitus listening to them. I just feel a little embarrassed, like a soft touch, liking Enya so much. Yet, I know that I am not alone among men. Not long ago a Harvard University astronomer named a minor planet (number 6433) after her. If that’s not a gesture of adoration from an astronomer, I don’t know what is. Last year, AskMen.com featured Enya as “Singer of the Week.” Answering the question: “Why we like her?” the site offers: “Her musical compositions are soothing for the soul and powerful enough to set the mood. Her music can be uplifting or depressing, however you are feeling at that particular moment in time. Laugh, cry, smile, frown—whatever the case may be—Enya’s got your back.” A male reader comments: “Enya is my favorite artist of all time. She has woken me up in the mornings and sang me to sleep on many nights. She’s been my friend through a lot of things. I truly love her music. And by the way, she isn’t New Age. She’s Enya!”
From time to time I surf the Web and watch an Enya video, and I am reminded of who I was when I first heard her and of who I am now, and of how far I have traveled—around the world and within myself—over the years. The short dramas that unfold may be a tad trite but that does not make them less true. Her videos often feature bored or over-studious boys or girls or hard-hearted men who, upon seeing Enya float into their lives singing, see through her to the visions about which she is singing, visions that seem to have lain dormant in their own hearts. The characters are then swept away by what was already in them: their dreams of love, beauty, flight. Amidst the soft focus and digitized water-coloring, there is movement and escape from the prisons of their own making with the help boats, kites, red balloons, galloping horses, paper airplanes. And no one ever comes back because their lives are now changed for the better and for good.
We are growing older together, Enya and me. Like any couple that has been together for years and through it all—births, deaths, financial struggles, shattered dreams, broken hearts, betrayals—I can often anticipate what she’s going to say before she says it, and the sound of her voice and some of the things she says are indelibly etched into my mind. Like a supportive companion, and as a result of my being a somewhat taciturn man, I let her do most of the talking because I find what she has to say interesting and pleasant to listen to, even if it is getting a little repetitive. And I never interrupt; if I arrive where I have set out to go in the middle of her song, I tarry to let it finish before I get out of the car. That is my way to thank her and to show her how much I respect her.
I have no idea what Enya is like when she is not playing music. She may be bad-tempered, for all I know. That makes no difference to me. I’ve heard swans are bad-tempered, but their beauty can still stop you in your tracks and carry you away.
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