8. EnyaWatermark
I would go to Walmart with my mom. While she went shopping, I would always go to the music section. There was a compilation section called ‘Pure Moods Random’. They’d have these headphones that I could listen to and bide time while my mom was shopping. I didn’t like to shop. They’d have the CDs that were on the walls, and I’d put it on like ‘who the fuck is this?’ It happened to fall on ‘Sail Away’. Then, I started doing research. I would come to find that Enya is one of the only New Age artists to sustain on the Billboard charts for weeks – like thousands of weeks.It’s because nobody could touch the way she held this sound.
I had no idea what New Age was. By the time I was done going down that rabbit hole, I was so enamoured and taken aback by someone that was living in this space and completely owning it. She opened up my world as a dancer, especially in modern and contemporary dance. It became the palette for a lot of my choreography. In my mom’s dancing school, I became a teacher there. The girls knew they were going to get something they’d not heard of. They were like, ‘Dawn, you’re doing the most’. But they got educated. I’ll always be the teacher who exposed them to music that they probably never would have heard or understood.
