Welcome back to NAGCHAMPA. That stands for New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful.

We’re listening to every album that was ever awarded, or nominated for, the Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album.

We’ve reached 1997, when the award went to Enya for her fourth studio album, The Memory of Trees. Between 1993 and 2007, every time Enya released an album, this award was a given. No other New Age artist stood a chance if there was an Enya album in the running. This spell would be broken in 2017, when her Dark Sky Island album lost out to the second album by White Sun. Oh, and her 2008 Christmas album wasn’t even nominated. Maybe festive albums aren’t eligible for this gong.

Anyway, for the time being, if Enya’s in town, every other New Age musician may as well stay at home. This is her game.

But did she deserve to win five New Age Grammy awards, effectively trivialising any work produced by any other artist any year she happened to win an album?

Yes. Of course she did.

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