21. Enya - Watermark

21. Enya - Watermark

A story: I've always had trouble sleeping. It wasn't so much that I didn't sleep well, or that I was always tired, it was just certain nights I couldn't fall asleep, no matter what I tried. This got to be a pretty big problem around my sophomore year of High School, when I was going 2 or three days in a row with less than 2 hours of sleep (This was before my body had grown used to such things, and no longer felt it out of the ordinary.) I'd just lie awake all night, thinking about things [my brain endlessly grinding on things it had no control over], and wishing I could fall asleep. I told Beth about it, and she sent me a tape, and told me to listen to it at night when I was trying to go to sleep. It didn't work right away, and there were nights when I ended up hearing the whole tape 3 or 4 times through, but in time this tape seemed to develop the ability to calm and pacify me to the point that I could just fall asleep no matter how much was on my mind. Soon the tape was being used to calm me when I was pissed [which was a lot... this was High School we're talking about, after all], calm me when I was anxious, accompany me when I was studying, and overall just return me to a sense of normalcy when I was bugging out. When I got to college, it was one of the few tapes that remained in my car at all times, always ready to come through if I was about to explode. To this point, all I knew was that it was Enya, as Beth had written "Enya" on one side of the tape. Well one day during my Junior year of college, Swac and I were at a used Cd store, and I noticed a section of Enya, and I noticed Watermark, and the titles of some of the songs sounded pretty familiar (Orinoco Flow and Cursum Perficio), so I bought it, and it was indeed the album I had on the tape. Since that time I've gotten quite a few Enya albums, and I like them all, but none can compare to the power and memories that Watermark still holds for me.

In more recent years, I've done a little looking to see what exactly is being said in some of these songs. I knew that many of them were in a foreign language, (some Latin, some stuff I didn't recognize [later found them to be Irish Gaelic, which makes sense]).) Anyway, I was pleased when I saw that the lyrics themselves were pretty good (i.e. they weren't just Chumbawamba translated into Latin, or anything.). My favorite song on the album since the first time I heard it is Storms in Africa (II). As a fan of just sitting and watching thunderstorms, any song that begins with the sounds of a storm are going to get a few extra points.