‘And Then Winter Came…’: How Enya’s Christmas Album Perfectly Captured The Season

What was the recording process for ‘And Winter Came…’?

Enya met her two creative partners, Nicky Ryan and Roma Ryan, back when she was part of the group Clannad. Nicky’s influences are among pop’s greatest studio innovators: The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, The Beatles. “When I play a melody, I’ll sort of hum the song and I hear a totally different arrangement to what Nicky hears,” Enya said in 2016. “But what we like to do is to try everything. Now there are sparks that will happen: ‘My idea is better than your idea,’ and all of that! But what’s really good is to let the other person try things. What evolves makes it very exciting.”

Roma Ryan, who is a poet and writer, is the primary lyricist for Enya. Roma’s interest and skill in wordcraft has extended to the creation of a new language, Loxian, which can be heard on Enya’s albums Amarantine and Dark Sky Island. Roma wrote the lyrics to all but the traditional songs on And Winter Came…, with the album containing some of his most crystalline words, all refracted through Enya’s exquisite voice. Last Time By Moonlight is especially haunting, the words like footsteps in fresh snow.

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Enya has always allowed space for her music to grow. “I have great gaps between each album,” she told GMTV in 2008, “because of the way I work. It’s in the studio with two other people [Nicky and Roma], and it was a condition when I signed with the record company that I could take as long as it required to put an album together.” She has talked of the importance of letting her work breathe, of ensuring breaks are part of the process. The unhurried mood of And Winter Came… seeps through every song, a gift of headspace to the listener.

What were the singles from ‘And Winter Came…’?

Just one single was released from And Winter Came… This was Trains And Winter Rains, which came out on 10 November 2008, and it was Enya’s personal choice for the album’s lead track. “I find traveling by train gives you time to think and reflect,” Enya has said of this track, which ranks among the best Enya songs. “The rhythm of a train journey is particularly soothing; it allows you to listen to your thoughts, even plan the future, and daydream especially.” She has described the song as being about the vulnerabilities and excitement of leaving home for the first time.

The video for Trains And Winter Rains was filmed in the Canary Wharf area of London, usually an oppressively busy hub for workers. But, in the promo clip, the train station is quiet, the few passengers in their own bubbles while unsettled weather brews around them. Enya surveys the scene from her train carriage. Throughout the video, she evokes the isolation of London as early darkness falls, the only light coming from office windows.

The gloves that Enya wears in the video are also a personal touch. “I remember wearing gloves for the first time when I left home for college,” she said in 2008. “They were my mother’s gloves, and a source of comfort. For me, singing the lyric, I put my own memories into it.”

What are the themes of ‘And Winter Came…’?

Enya has long let winter’s tranquillity seep into her music. Even back on her hugely successful second album, Watermark, the song Exile was preoccupied with winter, its opening verse reflecting on the beginning of the season: “Winter has come to land/Too close beside me”. And Winter Came…’s title track was selected to open the album because it, too, “sets the mood of autumn going into winter”, as Enya has said.

But even though winter is the primary theme throughout And Winter Came…, Enya still finds time for diversion. My! My! Time Flies! is the album’s most playful track. It was inspired by a real conversation between Enya and Roma about musical history. She namechecks Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and The Beatles’ Abbey Road, to a tune that almost pays homage to The Beatles’ tale of Maxwell and his silver hammer. “One forgot to wear shoes,” Enya sings on this track, referencing Paul McCartney appearing barefoot on Abbey Road’s cover, fuelling the infamous “Paul Is Dead” rumours.

And Winter Came… concludes with Oíche Chiúin (Chorale), Enya’s exquisite Irish-language version of Silent Night. The song had been a favourite of Enya’s since childhood. Enya had recorded it previously, as the B-side to her 1988 single Evening Falls… She had also performed it on the BBC TV show Christmas Day In The Morning. However, the version on And Winter Came… is the first time Enya recorded the song in in a chorale arrangement, almost evoking how she first performed it: as a child, in a choir, sung in her first language.

It’s the perfect, touching end to one of the great introspective Christmas albums. “Some people see [winter] as an ending, with a whole story before it,” Roma Ryan said, considering the mood of And Winter Came… “But I see it very much as a new beginning.”

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