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" Orinoco Flow", also released as " Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)", is a song by Irish singer-songwriter Enya from her second studio album, Watermark (1988). It was released on 3 October 1988 by WEA Records in the United Kingdom and by Geffen Records in the United States the following year. The song topped the UK Singles Chart for three weeks and received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Music Video and Best New Age Performance at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards. The Guardian ranked "Orinoco Flow" at number 77 on its list of the 100 greatest UK number-one singles in 2020.
The title of the song is an allusion both to Orinoco Studios (now Miloco Studios), where it was recorded, and to the Orinoco river in South America. Its pizzicato chords were generated by customising a Roland D-50 synthesizer patch. Enya was signed to WEA by Rob Dickins, who served as executive producer of Watermark, and the song pays homage to Dickins in the line "with Rob Dickins at the wheel". Co-producer Ross Cullum is referred to in the song with a pun on Ross Dependency: "We can sigh, say goodbye / Ross and his dependencies".
In 1998, a special-edition tenth-anniversary remix single was released.
In a 2015 interview with The Irish Times, Enya said: “Longevity is all any artist dreams of”, rather than to dwell on how her songs are remembered. She credits "Orinoco Flow" for some of her cross-generational appeal, saying: "people who used to like Orinoco Flow are now playing my music to their children". In another interview, when asked whether people bring up "Orinoco Flow", she responded: "people say 'sail away' to me or whistle bits of it back to me. I think it’s wonderful—I never tire of it."
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| +1988 year-end chart performance for "Orinoco Flow" !Chart (1988) !Position |
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| 25 June 1990 | CD |
In the 2002 I'm Alan Partridge episode "The Talented Mr. Alan", Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) is caught singing the song to himself. The song is in "Funeral", the 2003 sixth episode of the first series of Peep Show; the video is shown and the song plays over the end credits. The song is played during Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn)'s announcement scene in the 2010 film Shrek Forever After. It is in the 2010 first season episode, "Letting You Go", of Cougar Town. The song was briefly played during a monster cruise commercial in the 2018 film . The song was also used as the title song for the Netflix comedy-drama series Living with Yourself starring Paul Rudd and Aisling Bea.
Alternatively, the song is used in media to create a dissonance between its calmness and starkly contrasting visuals. The song is featured during a sequence in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of the novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is tortured while the song plays. In the 2016 Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation", one of the characters listens to the song to relax "shortly before she’s torn apart by murderous drones" and effectively returned "Orinoco Flow" to the top of the new-age charts after the episode was released.
An exception to this is the use of the song in the 2018 Bo Burnham film Eighth Grade. Burnham wrote to Enya directly for permission to use the song, and recognized it as a serious choice for the film; "in Eighth Grade, 'Orinoco Flow' finally gets to be itself" rather than "fodder for ironic laughs".
In the 2017 ITV tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Prince Harry recalls his mother listening to Enya driving in her BMW with the top down.
AIDA Cruises play this song often when they are put to sea.
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