![]() In the time set squarely between the age of the Mix tape and the era of burnable CDs, the music industry offered us an attractive option. If you were lucky enough to own a dual cassette player, you could sometimes record from one to another, but the whole process was a bit of an ordeal. To create your dream compilation required a great deal of finger dexterity to press the record and stop buttons at just the right time as they came on the radio. We did have the positively prehistoric predecessor of the mixtape, but it was a far more complex affair. 99 cents a song with the goal assembling the ultimate playlist. The song also contains the line We can sigh, say goodbye/Ross and his dependencies, a poke at co-producer Ross Cullum (Paul McCartney, Robert Plant) as a location, the Ross Dependency is actually a New Zealand-claimed region of Antarctica.Once upon a time, in a primitively technological world lightyears from today, we couldn’t just pick and choose the songs on our albums as we pleased. The song’s title comes from the name of the London studio where it was recorded, though it’s also the name of a 1,400-mile river in South America.Īnd the lyric contains a little tongue-in-cheek fun with the line We can steer, we can near/with Rob Dickins at the wheel, a nod to the Warner/Elektra/Asylum executive who was the executive producer of Watermark, and since 2002 has been known as Rob Dickins CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire). The song is a global geography lesson, and name-checks over a dozen locations to “sail away” to: From Bissau to Palau, in the shade of Avalon/From Fiji to Tiree and the Isles of Ebony/From Peru to Cebu hear the power of Babylon/From Bali to Cali, far beneath the Coral Sea, and so on. But the prosody is perfect, with the lyrical intent matching the overall feel of the production beautifully. It’s basically a piece about wanting to leave it all behind and sail away to various ports of the world. The vocals and production are what’s important here, the lyrics maybe less so if this were just performed as an acoustic song, the melody would certainly be arresting, but lyrically, the song isn’t all that deep in its motives. Enya broke through with “Orinoco Flow” and its dreamy, ethereal Celtic attitude with an unforgettable sound that some listeners loved, and some critics loved to trash. The three are responsible for eight highly successful albums so far. It represents the trio of people who have made her sound and success possible: the artist herself, her manager/producer/arranger Nicky Ryan, and Ryan’s wife, poet Roma Ryan, who writes the lyrics. “Enya” is the most pronounceable version of the singer’s real name, but the name is more than only that. ![]() “Orinoco Flow,” sometimes known as “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” helped make her a household name in the genre of new age music, though Enya herself reportedly has never been fond of the “new age” label. Watermark has sold over 11,000,000 copies (depending on whose numbers you believe), and has been reissued three times. alone, an amazing feat considering that she doesn’t undertake a live tour for each new album. A former member of the legendary Irish family band Clannad, Enya, the notoriously private singer who doesn’t tour and rarely performs in public, has sold some 80,000,000 records worldwide, more than 25,000,000 of them in the U.S. ![]()
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