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Enya Interviewed by Forbes

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Forbes recently did an interview with Enya called A Conversation With Enya About Sampling, The Nature Of Fame, And How To Control Your Career. Jimmy Ness’ via the phone interview is one of the best with this artist in years.

It goes like this:

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[Ness] Nicki Minaj said her latest album The Pinkprint was influenced by you.

[Enya] I was told that, um yes, to me it’s a great compliment to be inspirational to other artists. If we talk about what’s happening now with “Boadicea,” it has a great influence musically for a lot of people as did songs from some of my other albums and I feel that to me, personally, that’s a great compliment.

Who else has surprised you by being a fan?

I suppose the ultimate was Paul McCartney at the Oscars. We were performing together, at that year, our songs. He walked up and spoke to me and said, “I finally get to meet Enya,” and I’m talking to Paul McCartney from The Beatles! It was just a wonderful moment.

You’ve been sampled many times. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on sampling and if they’ve changed over the years.

It’s still very much the same on sampling. I work with Nicky and Roma, they’re really part of the team that have been there from the beginning. So they would get all of these requests in and they would listen. Firstly, they’d be listening out for anything that’s obscene. It has to be something of a melody by a singer that we really sort of enjoy the version of whatever they’ve sampled. We had to, in some way feel a link between what the song was about and the original song that we had written. 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. 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.

Read the complete interview here.