I've got one. I always really liked Enya's Watermark and Shepherd Moon albums. Her music was (and is) always derided as "fluff" and "soulless", but can you think of anyone else who shared her sound? She's every bit as distinctive as the most acclaimed bands of the past half century who are constantly credited for progressing musical culture. Who doesn't immediately recognize her hits, her sound? The difference is that the imitation of her sound produces endless streams of entirely crappy elevator music...instead of endless streams of almost entirely crappy, flash-in-the-pan pop hits that we're embarrassed to admit a decade or two later we really, really dug (which, if you think about it, is probably about 90% of the stuff you've liked in your life).
The pinnacle of her sound was easily reached in these two albums. Everything before and after is yawning echo, but those two albums, in spite of the universal contempt for them as landmarks of new age mediocrity, really do the stand the test of time in terms of their appeal. The music may be trite, but so is pretty much every "deep" thought that any of us fancy we may have had; so is the most extreme and personal emotions that we have ever felt. It's like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club. Contrary to what your parents told you; you're not exactly a fucking snowflake. That doesn't mean our personal journeys will ever stop being the most important one in the world to ourselves.
For me, songs like Caribbean Blue are sort of a shrine to the persisting truth of this "soulless" platitude. Yeah, it's toothless. Yeah, it's peaceful. Yeah, it's safe. This doesn't mean that meadows don't inspire something in us, and her stuff reminds me of that: cascading walls of soothing sound like sheets of water falling into water. So she's the Thomas Kinkade of musicians. Fine. Whatever. Don't care. Hate on.
