Enya Paints a Face on Her Music

Like many musicians, Enya loves being on the road. Traveling brings out the observer in her, allowing her to note differences among people and places, countries and cultures. It is, she says, endlessly fascinating. “I never seem to get tired of it. There’s always something new.”

But she doesn’t quite see the world the way other musicians of her stature would. At 36, she is the second-biggest pop act in Ireland, having sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. Of Irish pop acts, only U2 tops her in sales and success.

But unlike U2, Enya never has toured. In fact, she was for a while the world’s most anonymous superstar, a performer whose music--a one-of-a-kind sound drawing heavily on classical and Celtic traditions--was instantly recognizable to millions but whose face was a mystery.

That has changed. As she promotes her fifth album, “Paint the Sky With Stars: The Best of Enya,” the singer and instrumentalist slowly is raising her media profile. While in New York, she did both “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Late Show With David Letterman.” Now she is sitting in a hotel room doing a series of interviews for print media.

For some acts, a best-of album marks the end of the road. But for Enya, “Paint the Sky With Stars” was a different sort of journey. A decade had passed since the release of her first album, “The Celts,” and she was intrigued by the opportunity to look back at what she had done and “ponder the music,” as she puts it.

“For me, it’s very different to listen to the music,” she says, “because it’s reliving each story. Each song. It comes to life again. I think again of writing the melody, and I’m back there. I just go right back to that day.”

It isn’t just an act of memory. Enya is a dedicated diarist and has been keeping a journal since her career got underway. Moreover, she makes a habit of going back and reading what she has written. “I’ve been known just to sit down and pick a day,” she says. “What was I doing this day in ‘87?

“It’s incredible, because you are back at that day. Something will trigger it off, and you’re back there. And that’s kind of the feeling I had with the [album]. It’s like a musical diary.”

Given the quiet, reflective nature of Enya’s music, you might think her ponderings of the past would involve serious soul-searching. But she’s so animated and involved as she describes the process--laughing, joking, fixing the listener with her bright green eyes--that it’s hard to imagine her ever becoming morbidly self-absorbed.

Her diaries mainly concern her musical process--both the soul-searching that goes into understanding the emotions beneath the music and a document of how, exactly, she and producer Nicky Ryan tried to capture that sound on tape.

The first part isn’t easy. “You really don’t know what you’re looking for,” she says. “So there are all these questions. ‘Why did I feel compelled to write this kind of a melody? What draws me to this?’ And usually, I can find the answers. Eventually.”

It helps that she has a reliable sounding board in Nicky and Roma Ryan. Any time Enya has a new song in the works, they’re the first to hear it. “And I can see by their reaction that, yes, this is what I’m trying to say,” she says. Roma particularly is valued, because she’s the one who puts words--sometimes English, sometimes Gaelic, sometimes Latin--to Enya’s melodies.

Melody is central to her music. Although Enya’s training, both as a pianist and a composer, was in classical music, her roots are in the Irish folk tradition. Both of her parents played professionally, while two uncles and several of her siblings formed the enormously popular Irish band Clannad.

In Irish folk music, the melody is everything, so it should come as no surprise that Enya, who is as fluent in Irish music as she is in Irish Gaelic, starts there. Sometimes she plays the melody on the piano; more often, it is entirely vocal. However it comes, though, the inspiration can be amazingly quick. “I just let it happen,” she says. “I like to treat [songwriting] like it takes me on a journey.”

But as with any journey, turning a song into a recording takes many steps. So even though she considers writing the melody to be “the most exciting moment” of the process, she says her elation is short-lived. “It’s great for maybe a day, and then, it’s like: ‘OK. What are we going to do with this melody?’ ”

What makes Enya’s albums so entrancing is their ability to articulate emotion, to take the listener deep within the heart of her melodies. For all their quiet, there’s often tremendous depth to the songs, and whether it’s the wistfulness that animates “Shepherd Moons,” the forgiveness within “The Memory of Trees” or the longing for transcendence that drives “Orinoco Flow,” the feelings that fuel these songs are articulated through the sound-scapes Enya and her producer create.

One of the reasons Enya’s albums have such a distinctive feel is that she and Nicky Ryan do not take a normal approach to instrumental sound.

Instead of thinking in terms of standard instrumentation, they go after odd combinations in order to create something new. For instance, what the listener hears as a single sound could be made up of overdubbed piano, synthesizer, harp and pizzicato violin. In a sense, it’s like the way a landscape artist working in oils will create a visual effect by painting white over blue over green.

Another of Ryan’s favored devices is reverb. Thanks to digital technology, a sound can be processed to give it almost any sort of resonance imaginable, from a closet- to a cathedral-size echo.

Layering sounds like this can require Enya to play the same part dozens and dozens of times. And because neither she nor Ryan ever really knows what the sound will be until they’re finished, sometimes they invest days in experiments that ultimately don’t work.

The process requires an unusual amount of creative confidence. After all, when you put several weeks of work into a single song, it’s easy for doubt to creep in along the way. “It’s best to leave the studio when you start to question too much at a particular stage,” Enya says. Sometimes, she and Ryan put a piece aside for a few weeks, then go back to it when their ears are fresh.

Ultimately, she says, it all comes down to focus. “I find that it’s really important to forget success, forget albums, forget listeners, fans--forget everything. Just go in and see, musically, what’s going to happen.

“So the studio that we work in, which is just a little studio, has that wonderful sense of coming into this world of music. You really do not bring anything else past the doorstep with you. And it’s great.”