“There was no middle eight, and ‘sail away’ was after every line – it drove me crazy, but there was something there”: The making of Enya's Orinoco Flow, the unexpected No. 1 hit that created a New Age superstar

Nicky Ryan - the producer behind the music of Irish superstar Enya - passed away earlier this week at the age of 79.

Collaborating with Enya on eight studio albums, Ryan shaped the sound of Grammy-winning records such as Amarantine, Shepherd Moons and The Memory of Trees, alongside her chart-topping breakout single Orinoco Flow. In Nicky’s memory, we’re taking a look back at the making of Enya’s best-loved song.

Eithne Ní Bhraonáin – better known as Enya – met Nicky when he was the manager of Clannad, a Celtic folk group made up of several of Enya’s family members. After a brief stint performing with Clannad, she departed the band in the early ‘80s with the intention of forging her own musical path as a solo artist.

Following some conflict within the group, Nicky and his wife Roma, then Clannad’s tour manager, joined her. Forming a creative partnership that would endure throughout most of Enya’s career, Nicky handled production and Roma the lyrics, while Enya wrote and performed the music.

After leaving Clannad, Enya moved into the Ryans’ home and began recording in Aigle Studios, a recording space they’d built in their garden. Over the next few years, Enya developed her style and technique, recording demo tapes that Roma would send to film producers in the hopes that Enya’s dreamy, cinematic songs might be a natural fit for the screen. Roma’s intuitions proved correct, and Enya was asked to write the soundtrack for 1984 rom-com The Frog Prince.

Another film project soon followed, and it was this – Enya’s evocative score for the six-part BBC documentary The Celts, released as her debut album in 1987 – that would catch the attention of a pivotal figure in Enya’s journey, Rob Dickins.

The chairman of Warner Music UK, Dickins was enchanted by Enya’s debut and offered her a generous record contract – quite the coup for an unknown artist recording floaty, New Age-adjacent music in a repurposed garden shed. “The record company thought I was mad,” Dickins later told The Guardian, “but sometimes you sign acts to make money, and sometimes you sign acts to make music”.

Little did Dickins know that Enya would make Warner money – quite a lot of it, in fact. Selling close to 100 million albums globally, Enya became one of the world’s wealthiest musicians and the most successful Irish solo artist of all time – all without once going on tour.

The song that would place Enya on the path to such stratospheric heights is Orinoco Flow, the lead single from her sophomore album Watermark. A surefire contender for the least likely No. 1 in chart history, the song’s pizzicato strings and airy, whimsical vocals nonetheless captured the hearts of a generation.

After signing with Warner, demos for Watermark were recorded at Nicky’s Aigle Studios, but Dickins suggested that the tracks were re-recorded digitally in London. Nicky and Enya shipped out from Dublin and landed at Orinoco Studios, a recording space that would lend its name to Enya’s most well-known song.

Demos were fleshed out and Enya soon had the makings of an album, but everyone felt strongly that something was missing. The record needed one more solid track to complete it, and Enya had the germ of an idea: a chord sequence and one simple phrase: “sail away”.

“When I signed Enya, Nicky said, ‘You're not going to push us for singles, are you?’ It wasn't that kind of music,” Dickins recalled in a 2008 interview. “I said as a joke, ‘Nicky, where's the single?’ A week later Nicky rang up and said, ‘We've got it!’ Got what? ‘We've got the single!’ He sent over what became Orinoco Flow. There was no middle eight, and ‘Sail away’ was after every line - it drove me crazy, but there was something there that could be worked on.”

With the main chord sequence and the beginnings of a structure in place, Nicky and Enya called in Roma from Dublin build out Enya’s initial hook into something more lyrically substantial. Roma's lyrics took listeners on a musical voyage around the world, name-checking destinations both real and imagined while repeating the hypnotic refrain that makes the song such an irresistible earworm. Seemingly a perfect fit for the song’s exploratory mood, the studio’s exotic-sounding name served as inspiration for its title.

The chords came to life after Enya stumbled on a lively strings preset on a rented Roland D-50 synthesizer. Like most of the D-50’s sounds, the ‘Pizzagogo’ preset recreated the sound of plucked pizzicato strings through a combination of PCM sample playback and subtractive synthesis, a then-groundbreaking fusion that Roland dubbed Linear Arithmetic synthesis.

Enya’s parts were played, not sequenced – surprisingly enough, no sequencers were used anywhere on Watermark, in an effort to bring a naturalistic, human feel to the songs that balanced its liberal use of synthesized sounds.

A hallmark of Enya’s sound is the use of huge stacked vocals, something Nicky achieved in the studio through a painstaking process of multi-tracked layering, without the assistance of a sampler.

To create Enya’s vast and ethereal one-woman choir, hundreds of vocal takes were recorded through a 32-track Mitsubishi digital tape machine, bounced on to a second machine and incorporated into the final mix. Multiple Lexicon 480L effects units were employed to provide the cavernous reverb that’s so characteristic of Enya’s spacious vocal tone.

Engineer James Barton, who mixed Orinoco Flow, recalled the process in a 2018 interview with The Ringer: “Enya’s great at building chords with her vocals. In fact, she’s quite amazing at it,” Barton said.

“It was discussed in the control room, and then she’d just go out and start singing it. And she sings like an angel. She would lay down the first part, her and Nicky would get on the talk-back, second part, third part, fourth part. And sometimes Nicky would have a guitar, so he’d strum the chord and then he could just show her what the notes were to build the chord.”

With so many layers involved in such a dynamic performance, you’d expect that compression would play an important role in the mixing stage. But Nicky was committed to achieving an organic, naturalistic sound on Watermark, choosing not to use a single compressor.

“We have to make the music sound right at the recording end of it and in this case that meant no compressors,” he told Sonics Magazine in 1989. “Almost every album these days is made with huge compression... but you really have to listen to this album or it just drifts by you."

With Enya’s layered vocals accompanied by a handful of synth parts, little else was needed to finish Orinoco Flow. Barton recalls recording a 30-piece string ensemble, presumably to add additional weight to the D-50’s pizzicato melodies, along with live timpanis that punctuated the dense mix with their low-end rhythms.

Once these final touches were laid down, the song and the album were complete, but neither Enya, Nicky, Roma or their record label were prepared for the level of success it would reach.

Released in 1988 as the lead single from Watermark, Orinoco Flow sailed its way up the charts almost immediately, spending three weeks at No 1 in the UK, snagging the top spot in Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland and the Netherlands and even breaking the charts in the U.S.

“In the week of release, Tower Records phoned up to say that when they played the album in the shop they sold 45 copies – almost everyone in the shop had bought the record. It was unheard of,” Dickins told The Guardian. “It went from 29 to 5, then to number 1 and we sold bucketloads of albums. It was totally rags to riches.”

Arriving at a time when New Age music (a label Enya has since dismissed) had yet to enter the mainstream, Orinoco Flow was an unlikely No. 1, blending Celtic mysticism with cinematic synthesizers and adventurous production techniques. But despite its quirks, Orinoco Flow was a pop song at heart, its iconic “sail away” hook bouncing around in your head for days after a single listen.

What did Nicky make of the song’s unexpected popularity? "It shows that people want something new, and it looks like this week it was the turn of something warm-sounding and different, instead of yet another Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit," he said in 1988. Nobody could have predicted Enya’s success, but perhaps that’s exactly why it found her.