By the start of the decade Enya had been over ten years at the top, with four best selling albums and close to 40 million sales to her credit. That had been achieved with a hugely original and distinctive sound, built around Enya’s voice and melodies, moulded and crafted in the studio by producer Nicky Ryan and copper-fastened by the thoughtful, intuitive lyrics of Roma Ryan. But there was a temptation to think that perhaps the Donegal-born star might begin to take it easy: she hardly needed to work, after all.

Instead, the noughties saw her grow further in stature. Used as background music to online coverage of the September 11 suicide attacks, her ‘Only Time’ captured the imagination in the most extraordinary way.
“That was something we couldn’t have anticipated,” Nicky Ryan recalls. “Here we were in the middle of these huge world-changing events and we were as gripped by what was going on as everyone else. It was a very traumatic moment. But CNN, I think it was, put ‘Only Time’ together with footage of the day and it went online as well. I remember looking at it for the first time and it was really an extraordinary experience. And then you started to see how many times it had been viewed – and it quickly rose into the millions. It clearly struck a chord. In a way it is very gratifying to see something you have worked on capture the imagination in the way, and become connected to such momentous events. But it is also humbling, because you think of all of the people who have suffered and lost friends, relatives and loved ones. But it was quite an extraordinary thing.”
Afterwards, Enya donated over $500,000 in cash and royalties to the firemen’s fund, set up to address the effects of the suicide attacks on New York, something that – in a strange twist – has never, Hot Press understands, been acknowledged publicly or by the recipients.
The album from which ‘Only Time’ was taken, A Day Without Rain, went seven times platinum in the US and eight times platinum in Canada – and became her biggest selling record ever. Her music was also used by Peter Jackson in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, as well as in a host of other movies, including Baby Blues, Sweet November, the Japanese Calmi Cuori Appassionati and Ocean Men. She shared a No.1 UK and No.2 US hit with Mario Winnans in 2004 with ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’. The Grammies continued to flow for A Day Without Rain and Amarantine. Honorary doctorates in UCG and the University of Coleraine followed in 2007. Album sales topped 80 million, confirming once again the extraordinary reach of music created in a cottage-industry style setting by the three members of Enya, the group, in a studio in Killiney, in Dublin...