Enya

Enya's popularity, in the 90's, and continuing appeal today, among those nostalgic 30-40 year olds, rests on one fact: human beings love repetition. All her songs sound exactly alike, they have the same beat, and the same "garblish" quality in the lyrics: the listener can make out one sentence or two in the song, and these keep repeating themselves with mild variations over and over again, and the rest of it sounds exotic because nobody knows what the heck is being sung. The rest of it even sounds like it could be some exotic foreign language, but not as foreign as say, Arabic, not the kind of foreign that you can pin down and say, Aha, that's French, but foreign, like Celtic, which nobody (that I know of, anyway) knows or has heard, but it's a language that one would LIKE to know or at least pretend that one has heard, because it is just so well, exotic. It evokes carefully crafted scenes of blue seas crashing against Irish coasts with long haired maidens in gowns singing (the "garblish" sections of Enya's songs) like mermaids on the afore-mentioned coasts. But the English sections appease us because we feel a connectedness, because of our understanding of the two sentences, to this Hollywood scene.
Add to that a boom-boom-boom beat and some polyphonies, and there. That's Enya.

Here are the 3 songs that I like of Enya's, and which probably are her most famous:

a) Orinoco Flow


b) Only if


c) May it be from the Lord of the Rings



OKay?

These are the ones that sound kind of new and original.

Now take ANY other song of hers, and every one of them will fit into one of the molds above.

Go on. Try it!