Enya Creative Collaborator, Nicky Ryan Dies at 79.
by John Diliberto 9/15/2025
Nicky Rhyan, 2015. Photo: J.Diliberto
You may not know this name but it is a greater loss to music than you might realize. Nicky Ryan, the Irish producer, recording engineer, and manager, left the planet on September 10 at the age of 79. Who was he? Look at the liner notes for Enya’s recordings and you will see him as producer of all eight of her official albums. But he was more than a producer. He was a guiding light to Enya’s sound, something of a Svengali, though not in a pejorative sense. It was Ryan who plucked Enya out of the important Irish family band, Clannad, where she was a bit-player to her older sister, singer Máire Ní Bhraonáin, (Anglicized as Moya Brennan).
Born in Dublin on July 14,1946, Ryan began his career in the Irish folk and traditional music scenes. In the mid-1970s, he became the sound engineer and later manager for Clannad, where he first worked with Enya, when she was still using her birth name, Eithne Brennan. He saw the success and heard the beauty of Clannad’s layered vocals as exemplified by “Theme from Harry’s Game.” Recognizing the beauty of Enya’s pure voice, he imagined that sound expanded, which they did to incredible effect, reputedly layering hundreds of vocal tracks.
In 1982, Enya left Clannad and began a creative partnership with Ryan and his wife, lyricist Roma Ryan. Together, the trio formed a unique artistic triumvirate: Enya composing and performing, Roma providing poetic and often otherworldly lyrics writing In Latin, Gaelic and Loxian, a fantasy language she invented, and Nicky producing and arranging with meticulous care. Their home studio, Aigle Music, became the birthplace of landmark albums including Watermark (1988), Shepherd Moons (1991), and The Memory of Trees (1995). These works, shaped by Ryan’s distinctive production, brought Enya more than 80 million in record sales and multiple Grammy Awards.
Picking up cues from Clannad and maybe The Carpenters, where Karen Carpenter’s voice was heavily layered, Ryan took multi-tracked vocals to extremes. It was a sound that simply became “the Enya sound”, which is a name you’ll see on many synthesizer patches and sound effects, reverb and echo units. Their music was intimate, as if Enya was singing inside your head, and expansive, like The Vault in the TV series, Foundation; The more you went in, the deeper it got.. They could turn it into hit pop tunes like “Orinoco Flow” and “Caribbean Blue” or almost liturgical tracks like “Angeles.”
I interviewed Enya four times and Nicky Ryan sat in on all of them. Ryan was garrulous in the great Irish tradition; Enya was shy and humble and sometimes almost accountant bland in her explanation of their work. Ryan was a little more able to articulate their collective vision than Enya. But she was sure of her relationship with the Ryans. “Enya is the three of us together, and if you take out one of us, Enya wouldn’t exist anymore,” she proclaimed in my first interview with them in 1989. “If you take away, Roma, Nicky or me it would collapse so it’s very much a three-way partnership.” That partnership remained until the end with Enya’s 2015 album, Dark Sky Island. That album could be their final release.
Nicky Ryan passed away on September 10. 2025 at St. Vincent’s Private Hospital in Dublin. He was 79. He is survived by his wife, Roma, and their two daughters, Ebony and Persia. He also leaves behind on of the most influential bodies of work from the late 20th century that artists still cite to me today as an influence.
A good journey to Nicky and heavy hearted condolences to all of his family.
To have patches and presets named after you, you have built pyramids.