Singer Songwriters From Ireland

"Long, long journey through the darkness, long, long way to go; but what are miles across the ocean to the heart that's coming home?"

"The poignancy of things A purple flower The blossoms of spring And the light snow of winter How they fall"

"Summer. When the day is over there's a heart a little colder; someone said goodbye, but you don't know why. Somewhere there is someone keeping all the tears they have been weeping, someone said goodbye, but you don't know why."

"Always looking for a meaning, all the time you keep believing, but I don't know why you won't say goodbye. Even when the sun is shining you don't see the silver lining, but I don't know why you won't say goodbye."

"It's only now when words are said that break my heart in two, I wonder how you can endure all I've said, all I say to you."

"After all the words are said, after all the dreams we made; every one a precious one, every one a summer sun..."

"A moment lost, forever gone, can never be again, so know how much it means to me; all you said, all you gave, all your love to me."

"A million feathers falling down, a million stars that touch the ground, so many secrets to be found amid the falling snow."

"The silence of a winter's night brings memories I hold inside; remembering a blue moonlight upon the fallen snow."

"From the City of Constellations to the wanderer and a Place of Rains he journeys on... ...the City of hesitation and doubt the Island of the house the colour of the sea the Plain of Mementoes he journeys on to find his love... ...the Valley of lost time the City of End and Endlessness the Isle of Revenents he journeys on..."

"in silence through the night close to the City of Realisations; it is here one finds the way... ...Mount Orison the City of Days the Tree of the lost he journeys on... ...north of his love a road through a valley of darkness the islands that are not of this world he journeys on to find his love..."

"It is a long way through darkness to the way of the eremite the eremite sings of the world and of the journey of love, which is not lost in eternity..."

"Enya left school in 1979, and we had already been a nucleus, so it was probably difficult for her. She wanted to go off and do her own thing. Tensions were created because we never answered any of the questions. If you're going to answer questions, people aren't going to believe you anyway. The proof of the pudding is that Enya is my sister, and I love her dearly, and we get on really, really well."

"She does have a life. She'd kill me if I talked about it, so I'm not going to talk about it. There's a difference between being a private person and a recluse. All this blushed and flushed stuff about her being a recluse put it to bed, for God's sake."

"Enya never writes a bad melody. That's first and foremost her secret. As she goes along, she'll start changing the dynamics, pushing here and there so that not everything is perfectly in unison. It adds a texture you can acquire only from having different voices. The variations lead to interesting quirks. It's an integral part of the Enya sound."

"Enya knew nothing about recording, about production or arrangements. Originally, we were stock-piling music and just letting her get on with it. There was no name on the music she was writing. All I knew was that hard work succeeded."

"I heard the soundtrack to The Celts TV programme, which Enya had done, and I thought "what's this magical music?", and it was such an antidote to the, sort of, the day's work, that every night I went home and played the soundtrack from The Celts. And then I met her in Ireland and she was telling me how she was signing to another record company, I went "no, no, no, no, you can't do this, you must sign with us." And I did it really just as a self-indulgence, that I thought this was beautiful music and wanted to be associated with it, there wasn't really a kind of commercial edge to it at all."

"Sometimes the company is there to make money, sometimes it's there to make music. Enya was the latter. I would have been a genius if I knew this was going to sell millions of records. I just wanted to be involved with this music."

"Enya and her team record and we stay in touch until there is something for me to listen to. I then provide an outside view. She is a genius in the studio, comparable to somebody like Brian Wilson, but she and Nicky can be their own worst enemies at striving for personal best all the time. I guess that's the price of perfectionism."

"You tend to behave yourself in her company. Make even a small joke about her songs and she gets angry. And she does have a peculiar effect on men. I've watched normally sane journalists waxing metaphysical when they meet her."

"Playing in a family band has many advantages, but it can often mean that when the going gets tough you take it out on each other with a liberty that only family can tolerate. I suppose it had always been difficult for Eithne. We loved what she brought to the band, but I know it was hard for her to infiltrate our years as a tightly knit nucleus. Musically, Ciaran and Pol had always been the creative force, and Noel, Padraig and myself had then worked our own expression around them. It was a good formula that worked well. Inevitably, when Eithne joined us full time, she found it hard. She hadn't been part of the original song-collecting days and consequently didn't share our enthusiasm for the old songs. I suppose she always felt little more than a "guest musician". As sisters we had always been close and talked about everything together, so I was sorry when band business caused a strain between us. One day, just after the tour, Eithne announced that she had decided to leave Clannad. She was going to pursue a solo career with Nicky Ryan as her manager. In the long term it turned out to be a good decision. I missed her, but I'm sure the apprenticeship with Clannad helped Eithne develop her own sound and afforded her strong contacts in the music business. She is talented and ambitious and, in the years that followed, the family was delighted to watch the success that came her way."

"Over the years I have learnt to be on my guard but, as any artist will testify, you are completely powerless if a writer has a certain agenda. There have been many damaging articles that have hurt my family deeply stories about our relationships, particularly between myself and Enya. We resolved in the early days not to talk about our private lives but, especially in Enya's case, this has often led to more intrigue and false speculation. For an artist, it is the unfortunate consequence of being in the public eye, but what makes me really angry is the way the family inevitably bears the suffering."

"Eithne had been working on her album and the single, 'Orinoco Flow', was released while we were in the studio. We were so excited for her. It was already at number eleven in the charts and we felt sure it was going to go up. We'd watched her on Top of the Pops the week before, so come Sunday evening we expectantly gathered in the house near the studio to listen to the Top Forty. Our youngest brother, Bartley, was working in London and he came over to be with us to hear the news. Number one! We were all shouting and screaming and hugging each other and you couldn't have heard the record playing above the din in the room. First we spoke to Eithne on the phone. More squealing. She was so happy and we knew that sharing the moment with us, even over the telephone, was very special. Then we rang our brother Leon who was over in Donegal. He'd been driving Mammy to church and they'd been frantically trying to get the radio station on the car radio so they could hear the result. The whole family were over the moon. That evening at dinner we had a bottle of champagne and toasted Eithne's success."

"On Christmas Day the traditional Brennan Christmas continued in full swing. It was wonderful that we could all be at home together. The girls set about preparing the meal while the boys rearranged the furniture so we could all sit around the table together. Eithne had just got a video camera and was skulking from room to room trying to catch everyone at their most embarrassing. It didn't take much to get us to act accordingly and the house was full of laughter and song."

"When we were growing up, the 45 single was the heart of rock-and-roll and in many regards still is. It's the hardest thing to pull off. The surest sign that a band is growing stale and running out of creative ideas is when it turns to prog. And I well remember the 1970s when prog almost destroyed rock music. It's the mold growing on a congealed band on its last legs. Indeed, it still lurks among us in new, insidious forms like indie. The few times U2 has attempted prog, we've tempered it with good songwriting."

"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bono is Time's Person of the Year."

"Bono gives us a vision of how tomorrow can be better than today. He appeals to something greater than ourselves. He tells the story of his life and struggles in terms everyone can understand. He speaks about faith in a way that even a nonbeliever can embrace."

"He's a strange sort of entity, this euphoric rock star with the chin stubble and the tinted glasses — a new and heretofore undescribed planet in an emerging galaxy filled with transnational, multinational and subnational bodies. He's a kind of one-man state who fills his treasury with the global currency of fame. He is also, of course, an emanation of the celebrity culture. But it is Bono's willingness to invest his fame, and to do so with a steady sense of purpose and a tolerance for detail, that has made him the most politically effective figure in the recent history of popular culture."

"I think that politicians are attracted at first by the celebrity but once they meet him, they find that he is outstandingly capable."

"I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don't believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet."

"He's a poet. He's a philosopher. And last night, I think I saw him walking on water."

"You have made people listen. You have made people care, and you have taught us that whether we are poor or prosperous, we have only one world to share. You have taught young people that they do have the power to change the world."

"[On the persecutions of Rohingya in Myanmar, and Aung San Suu Kyi‎'s lack of response to them] That is very hard, and I'm – I feel kind of nauseous about that. I have genuinely felt ill, because I can't quite believe what the evidence all points to. But there is ethnic cleansing. It really is happening, and she has to step down because she knows it's happening. I am sure she has many great reasons in her head why she is not stepping down. Maybe it's that she doesn't want to lose the country back to the military. But she already has, if the pictures are what we go by, anyway. The human rights that are being torched, the lives that are being burned out in Rakhine State are more important than a unity without them. … She should, at the very least, be speaking out more. And if people don't listen, then resign. This is all just really troubling. I am still confounded by it, actually. I am still confounded by it, actually. … Is it that we project onto people who we want them to be? We find somebody we like, and we tell ourselves that a person exists that is better than us. More able than us. A truer moral compass than us. We imbue them with all these qualities. We do that with people. I think I have had it done to me. People have their version of you, they project what they want to see on you. Maybe she was always a politician. She was not a saint. She was not some sort of savior. Maybe we were always wrong, and we just have to accept we were wrong. Or maybe something terrible has happened to her that we just don't know."

"I met this poet named Brendan Kennelly. I have known him for years; he is an unbelievable poet. And he said, “Bono, if you want to get to the place where the writing lives, imagine you’re dead.” There is no ego, there is no vanity, no worrying about who you will offend. That is great advice."

"I'm less unsure about taking political risks or social risks. When I became an activist, people were like, "Really?" But they eventually accepted that. Then I started to be interested in commerce and the machinery of what got people out of poverty and into prosperity. And then a few people said, "You can't really go there, can you?" I said, "But if you are an artist, you must go there." You and I have had the conversation over the years: What can the artist do? What is the artist not allowed to do, and are there boundaries? Now, I would say to my younger self: "Experiment more and don't let people box you in. There is nothing you can't put on your canvas if it is part of your life.""

"These last two albums mix up the personal and the political so that you don't know which one you're talking to. That's a kind of magic trick, and realizing that of course all the problems that we find in the exterior world are just manifestations of what we, you know, what we hold inside of us, in our interior worlds. The biggest fucker, the biggest asshole, the biggest, the most sexist we can be, the most selfish, mean, cunning, all those characters you are going to see them in the mirror. And that is where the job of transformation has to start first. Is that not what experience tells us?"

"There is a continent — Africa — being consumed by flames. I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did — or did not to — to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do."

"These goals — clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty — these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a Globalised World."

"A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it... I have a family, please look after them... I have this crazy idea... And this wise man said: stop. He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Get involved in what God is doing — because it's already blessed."

"I close this morning on … very... thin... ice. This is a dangerous idea I've put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God... vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity. And this is a town — Washington — that knows something of division. But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call the least of these. This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith. "Do to others as you would have them do to you." [Luke 6:30] Jesus says that. "Righteousness is this: that one should... give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives." The Koran says that. [2.177] Thus sayeth the Lord: "Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring fourth, then your Lord will be your rear guard." The Jewish scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again."

"Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives. Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone. I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill... I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff... maybe, maybe not... But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house... God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives... God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war... God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them."

"It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much... yet. He hasn't spoken in public before... When he does, his first words are from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," he says, "because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favour, the year of Jubilee. [Luke 4:18] What he was really talking about was an era of grace — and we're still in it."

"One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment... I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV. Even though I was a believer. Perhaps because I was a believer."

"I presume the reason for this gathering is that all of us here — Muslims, Jews, Christians — all are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God. I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too. Yes, it's odd, having a rock star here — but maybe it's odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was... well, a little blurry, and hard to see."

"I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned — I'm Irish."

"I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural... something unseemly... about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert... but this is really weird, isn't it?"

"If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex. Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation."

"I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world. Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn't believe it. It almost ruined it for me — 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS. I've started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as "narrow-minded idealists." If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning."

"These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I'm the sort of character who's got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I'm going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it's sort of underpinning for me."

"If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there's a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in "straw poverty"; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me. … As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It's so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don't use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I'm the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut. … I try to take time out of every day, in prayer and meditation. I feel as at home in a Catholic cathedral as in a revival tent. I also have enormous respect for my friends who are atheists, most of whom are, and the courage it takes not to believe."