Alright folks, here it is, Distractifying! at it’s best. (By the way, this is not the Oronoco River. This is just a random public domain photo of a river that looked like it had a pretty cool flow goin’ on. )
I was finishing up a short post about Camp NaNoWriMo and my writing goal for the month of July. (Not going to hit that goal, by the way, but I’m still pluggin’ away). I ended it with the words, “…do whatever it takes to stay in the flow.”
WELL! That reminded me of a song I used to enjoy called “Oronoco Flow,” by Enya. So I pulled it up and listened to it on YouTube. Wow! Nostalgia, right?
Anyway, as I listened to it, I realized that I had never really understood the lyrics, except for “Sail away, sail away, sail away,” and “Oronoco flow”. (Squirrel moment – How many songs are out there like that, where you have no idea what the singers are actually singing, but you love the song anyway?) I went back to Google to pull up the lyrics, and I still don’t understand them. It’s really a whole lot of nonsense that has nothing to do with the Oronoco River.
The river, mostly in Venezuela, though it shares a portion of the border with Columbia, eventually empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Based on the amount of water that flows through it, the Oronoco is the 4th largest river in the world, but at anywhere from 1306 to 1398 miles in length, (depending on how you calculate the length (there’s a whole discussion about that on Wikipedia)), it doesn’t even crack the top fifty.
Then there’s the reference to Rob Dickins. Never, in the hundreds of times I listened to this song, had I ever heard the name Rob Dickins in the lyrics. It turns out, he was the head of the studio at the time of the recording. Hmmmmm. Seems Enya has a sense of humor. And, that humor continues in the next portion of lyric, where “Ross and his dependencies” is mentioned.
Yes, Ross Cullum was a producer on the project, though it is said that he was out sick on the day that “Oronoco Flow” was recorded. But! The Ross Dependency is also a geographic reference. It denotes a portion of Antarctica claimed by New Zealand. So, apparently, Enya also liked to play word games in her songs. Or, at least she did in this one.
While my life has moved on from New Age music, there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the music of Enya, and especially the “Oronoco Flow.”