Shepherd Moons

• 1. Introduction

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  Shepherd Moons is the third studio album by the Irish singer and musician Enya, and for months after it was finished she could not bring herself to play it. Asked about that reluctance, she answered, "I will find any excuse not to." She called the feeling fear. Every feeling and emotion she had was poured into the record, and she dreaded that it would fall short of what she hoped for. She went further and said she had never felt so miserable as she did on finishing it. What was she so afraid of? Who stood beside her while the music took shape? And how did a record built from layered voices, centuries-old songs and unusual titles find its way to so many listeners?

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• 2. Life After Watermark

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  In September 1988, Enya released her second studio album, Watermark, and the response surprised nearly everyone. Its single "Orinoco Flow" became a top-ten hit in countries around the world. She spent much of the following year travelling for interviews, appearances and performances. After so long on the road, she chose to return to the studio rather than plan a full concert tour. There was a practical reason too. Her music is built in the studio, and recreating that sound on a stage is difficult.

  Stepping back into the studio did not make the work easy. As she composed new melodies, she kept asking herself, "Would this have gone on Watermark? Is it as good?" She later admitted, "I put a lot of pressure on myself at the beginning." The way out was to let the comparison go. She decided to start on a blank canvas and follow what felt right in the studio.

  Once the work was under way, the old album faded into the background. In her words, "It felt like Watermark was a dream. It felt like it hadn't happened." She found that oddly freeing, because she could think only about the music. Charts and sales totals dropped out of her mind.

  One habit survived the fresh start. Enya treats a strong melody as the foundation of every song she writes. She usually works it out first with vocal ideas or piano, and only then builds a song around it.

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• 3. Voices and Rooms

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  Irish is Enya's first language, and on this album it sits beside English and Latin. Her Catholic upbringing shaped the sound. As a child she knew hymns and church music, and later she studied classical music. For ideas she also drew on her personal diaries and on her grandparents.

  Much of the album was recorded at Aigle Studio, the studio in the home of Nicky Ryan and his wife Roma Ryan. The house stood in Artane, a northern suburb of Dublin. Nicky was her manager, arranger and producer, and Roma wrote the lyrics. New equipment bought with the profits from Watermark filled the studio. Even so, Aigle lacked the right gear for the final mix and mastering, as had been true for her two earlier albums. The recordings were finished at SARM West Studios in London. There, "How Can I Keep from Singing?", "Book of Days" and "Lothlórien" were recorded, with Gregg Jackman providing extra engineering and mixing.

  A handful of guest players added colour. Andy Duncan played percussion on "Book of Days", and Roy Jewitt played clarinet on "Angeles". Liam O'Flionn brought the uilleann pipes to "Smaointe...", and Steve Sidwell played cornet on "Evacuee". Nicky himself played percussion on "Ebudæ".

  The voices were the real instrument. In some passages Enya recorded 500 layered vocals, with no sampling or copying. She found that the process had changed her. "The difference," she said, "is that I've mellowed." She had taken more time away from the studio than before, including during moments she called "quite difficult", and she felt that the distance improved her creativity in the long run.

  Once each melody was complete, Roma wrote the words for it. She also gave the songs many of their names.

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• 4. Names From Sky and Sea

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  The title track begins with wordless vocals, and its name came from Roma. In 1980, two small inner moons of Saturn were discovered, Pandora and Prometheus. They were said to "protect and preserve the rings very much like a shepherd guiding his flock". Enya liked the title for another reason as well, because the moon is "quite romantic".

  "Caribbean Blue" is a waltz that travels through a fantasy world. Roma named it because the melody Enya had found reminded her of the Caribbean. Writing about the song in 2002, she described it as a dream of the ideal. The lyrics, she said, come down to three words, "Believe in yourself."

  "Ebudæ" is an ancient name for the Hebrides, the islands off western Scotland. Enya had already slipped the word into "Orinoco Flow", in the line "From the north to the south, Ebudae into Khartoum". The new song is made of wordless mouth sounds that resemble Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Its story was inspired by waulking songs, which women sang while fulling cloth.

  Some titles came from books. "No Holly for Miss Quinn" is a piano instrumental named after a novel by Miss Read. It is a partner to "Miss Clare Remembers" from Watermark, which was named after another of that author's stories. "Lothlórien" is an instrumental named for the Elvish kingdom in The Lord of the Rings novels and their adaptations.

  The Latin title "Afer Ventus" means "African Wind". Roma chose it after listening to the track. Its melody lines kept "sweeping in between each other", and the effect was of wind. Two other songs on the record had far older roots, and they would bring Enya trouble of different kinds.

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• 5. Songs of Memory and Loss

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  Enya has kept a diary for years, and Roma suggested that it could feed a song. The result was "Book of Days". It began as an instrumental for the soundtrack of the 1992 romantic film Far and Away. Roma then wrote lyrics based on the film's themes. The Irish words describe the excitement of writing in a diary in the morning, "because you don't really know what's going to happen". Enya explained that the song was about the expectation of the day.

  A television documentary lies behind "Evacuee". Enya and Roma watched a BBC programme about a child who had been evacuated from London during World War II and later reunited with her parents. The girl wept as she told it, and the two women were deeply moved. Once Enya had a melody, they pictured the girl saying goodbye at a train station, "waiting until it's all over".

  The darkest story belongs to "Smaointe...", which roughly translates from Irish as "Thoughts...". It first appeared in 1988 as a B-side to the 7-inch single of "Orinoco Flow", under the title "Smaoitím... (D' Aodh Agus Do Mháire Uí Dhúgain)". The song recalls a large tsunami that destroyed a church and everyone inside it at Magheragallon Beach in Gweedore. Enya's grandparents are buried there.

  Loss runs through both Watermark and Shepherd Moons, and Enya traced it to an early separation. At age eleven she left home for a strict boarding school, an experience she called "devastating".

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• 6. Two Borrowed Songs

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  Two tracks on Shepherd Moons were not written by Enya at all. She rearranged them with Nicky Ryan. At first she worried that she could not perform songs she had not composed with as much emotion as her own. Her strong feelings for them, and their age, made recording easier than she feared.

  The first was "How Can I Keep from Singing?", which she believed to be a traditional Christian hymn of the Shaker sect. She liked its melody and its "very strong" lyrics. Each verse admits the world's trouble and strife, yet ends by asking how anyone can keep from singing. Enya said she believed the same about music, that at some stage you have to try to forget the trouble around you.

  Her belief about its origin led to a lawsuit. Sanga Music, Inc. sued Enya and her record company for copyright infringement. She had credited the track as a "traditional Shaker hymn" and so assumed it was in the public domain. The song's history was more tangled. In the 1950s, Pete Seeger helped make it well known. He published it in his folk music magazine Sing Out! in 1957, with a third verse added by Doris Plenn, and he recorded it. Seeger labelled it a "traditional Quaker hymn" and did not copyright Plenn's verse, which made the whole song look like public domain. Sanga Music published it again in 1964. Plenn had only wanted the song preserved, not to make a profit. The court therefore decided that Enya could use the verse without paying royalties.

  The second borrowed piece, "Marble Halls", is an aria from The Bohemian Girl, an opera from 1843 by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe. Enya found it a challenge because it had only ever been sung in an opera setting. Nicky had his own idea about the sound. Since the title suggested a hall, he wanted listeners to feel as if they stood inside one, so he added reverb.

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• 7. The Chart Climb

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  On the 4th of November 1991, WEA released Shepherd Moons in the United Kingdom. Reprise Records followed in the United States on the 19th of November 1991. A promotional box set was limited to 1,000 copies. It held a CD and a cassette of the album, plus a 14-page booklet autographed by Roma, with her words on each track and the lyrics.

  In Britain, the album reached number one for a single week, the week ending the 16th of November 1991. It stayed on the UK chart for 110 weeks in total. In the United States it entered the Billboard 200 at number forty-seven in the week of the 7th of December 1991. It peaked at number seventeen in the week ending the 28th of March 1992. It remained on that chart for 238 weeks. On the Billboard New Age Albums chart, it held number one for twenty-nine weeks during a stay of 266 weeks. Elsewhere it reached number two in Norway, number three in New Zealand and Spain, number five in Sweden, number seven in the Netherlands and number eight in Australia.

  Sales matched the chart runs. In its first week in the United States, the album sold over 250,000 copies, and it became Warner Bros. Records' top seller in early 1992. The effect spread to Enya's older work. Three months later, another 250,000 copies of Watermark had sold in the same country.

  The momentum lasted for years. Seven million copies had been sold worldwide by July 1994. In the United States the album sold close to one million copies each year from 1992 to 1996. The RIAA certified it quintuple platinum in March 1996 for shipments of five million. In January 1997, the BPI certified it quadruple platinum for 1.2 million shipped. By 1994 it had spent 52 weeks on the Spanish charts and sold nearly 400,000 copies there. The worldwide total is estimated at 13 million.

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• 8. Four Singles

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  "Caribbean Blue" arrived in November 1991 as the lead single and peaked at number thirteen in the United Kingdom. It also picked up some crossover airplay on alternative rock radio stations in the United States.

  The second single, "How Can I Keep from Singing?", also came out in 1991. It carried two B-sides that had not been released before. One was "Oíche Chiúin (Silent Night)", an Irish-language version of the Christmas carol, recorded in 1988. The other was "'S Fágaim Mo Bhaile", an original composition recorded in 1991.

  In July 1992, "Book of Days" became the third single, and it climbed to number ten in the United Kingdom. That was the highest position for any single from the album.

  The last single, "Marble Halls", came out in 1994 and benefited from a film. The 1993 film The Age of Innocence had included the song, which brought the old aria to a new audience. Between the four releases, the singles spread across three years. Enya meanwhile backed the album with a worldwide promotional tour of interviews and televised performances.

  Mike Joyce of The Washington Post called Enya's vocals "impressive" and "crystalline", and said they bring "unmistakable poignancy to much of the album". He was less kind to the piano-led tracks, including "No Holly for Miss Quinn" and the title track. In his view they make the record "succumb to the usual new age doldrums".

  Barbara Jaeger of The Record was more enthusiastic. She felt the three-year wait since Watermark was "worth it", because the album offered "rich sonic tapestries that envelop the listener". She singled out "Angeles" and "Caribbean Blue", and she praised the singing in Irish. In a later review for AllMusic, Ned Raggett noted similarities to Watermark. He added that Enya had "polished and refined her work to a strong, elegant degree" while sticking with her own vision.

  In 1993, Enya won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album for Shepherd Moons, the first of four she has won. She also took home an IFPI Platinum European Award, a Billboard Music Award and a National Association of Recording Merchandisers Award for Best Selling Album.

  The cover drew its own praise. David Scheinmann took the photograph, and the wardrobe came from The New Renaissance. The writer Molly Burke described Enya in what she called an opera gown, with a sense of timelessness bathed in "the dark but fragile blue of sorrow".

  The sound has influenced other musicians. Saxophonist Colin Stetson credited the album as an influence on his 2017 album All This I Do for Glory. He said it "made me think about how the air is manipulated in my own music."

  The album was reissued in 1992 and again in 2009. The 2009 release came from Warner Music Japan in March and added bonus tracks. A vinyl LP appeared worldwide on the 2nd of December 2016.

  On the 4th of November 2021, thirty years to the day after release, Enya's YouTube channel streamed a live watch party. The whole album played in order, with poems by Roma Ryan and commentary on every track.

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