Why Enya tried to have The Fugees’ album pulled over a sample dispute
It’s hard to imagine Irish new age maga Enya showing the faintest hint of simmering rage, considering the oceanic soothe that ripples across her ambient body of art.
She’s managed to maintain a fairly consistent cloak of mysterious intrigue across her well over 40-year career. A good effort considering Enya’s one of Ireland’s biggest selling artists of all time, claiming over 50million certified sales and behind only U2’s unit shifts, allegedly castle neighbours with Bono in County Dublin’s Killiney area. Yet, you don’t see the ‘Orinoco Flow’ singer at massive press junkets or VIP celeb jamborees, rarely proffers official merch, and seemingly operates in a far-flung pasture far removed from the music industry’s corporate sump.
All part of her enchanted image, and fans wouldn’t want it any other way. Formerly a half-member of the Celtic family collective Clannad, Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin parted ways for a solo career, along with band manager Nicky Ryan to handle production and his poet wife Roma crafting the lyrics. This core creative trio would largely operate in isolation for the next several decades, finding pockets of surprise pop success with 1988’s Watermark and counting everybody from Pope John Paul II to Grimes as fervent fans.
Perhaps most surprising of all is Enya’s presence in hip-hop and surrounding R&B pop, with Rihanna, P Diddy, Scarface, and The Weekend all sampling her uniquely ethereal conjurings, and Nicki Minaj on record for saying the Irish artist directly inspired 2014’s The Pinkprint. While dwelling in reclusive realms, the Enya team aren’t inaccessible regarding artists eager to nab a slice of her work. “I’m not closed about people sampling the music, far from it,” she told Forbes in 2016. “There’s a lot of my music that’s been sampled, but I just feel it’s right to approach the artist.”
One band was almost certainly in Enya’s mind when laying the sampling ground rules. Over in the East Coast hip hop scene, The Fugees were working on 1996’s mega-selling The Score sophomore album, and sought to lift Enya’s haunting vocal coos from ‘Boadicea’ and mix with The Delphonics’ 1968 soul hit ‘Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide from Love)’ for The Score’s third single.
Trouble was, Enya was never “approached”. It turns out The Fugees had actually lifted ‘Boadica’ from the 1992 horror film Sleepwalkers rather than the original recording or even from its original score to the BBC’s The Celts documentary several years previous. Whether through sly pilfering or simple naivety, The Fugees hadn’t cleared the sample, and the otherwise empyreal Enya trio hit pause on their celestial aloof to flex some wholly uncosmic litigious action.
“At the beginning, with The Fugees, we were actually on the verge of suing them because of the copyright infringement, because they just didn’t approach us,” Enya recalled. “It was a case of, I wasn’t featured at all on the credits, and it [the sample] was very much a part of the song. So myself, Nicky and Roma felt it was very important to stand up in that regard to how we felt about sampling. By all means… if you want to sample a piece, but come forward, let’s hear the song, and if we’re happy to go ahead, we will absolutely approve.”
Thankfully, Enya’s legal people turned around upon hearing ‘Ready or Not’, liking the track and happy to see ‘Boadica’s usage in a very un-gangsta rap number as was initially feared, resulting in an out-of-court settlement and no hard feelings. Lesson learned, and a reminder to the music world that even the ‘Caribbean Blue’ weaver can get down to business when necessary.
“I think they’re wonderful musicians,” Enya made clear regarding The Fugees. “We were both fans, but the way it just happened was the wrong way, and I just felt I had to make a stand for what I believed in musically.”
