How Can I Keep from Singing

Drawn from a nineteenth-century American hymn—variously attributed to the Baptist minister Robert Lowry or to Quaker tradition—"How Can I Keep from Singing" arrives on *And Winter Came* as an act of quiet spiritual resilience. Enya does not embellish the original's simple theological assurance; instead she trusts it completely, delivering each verse with a stillness that reads less as performance than as genuine testimony. The production is characteristically luminous—organ-like pads sustaining beneath overlapping vocal harmonies, her voice multiplied into a soft congregation of selves—but unusually modest for her catalog, with space left in the arrangement for the lyrics to breathe. The text insists that inner peace persists regardless of surrounding turbulence: storms rage, prisons close in, yet a current runs below all sorrow. Enya's interpretation doesn't minimize the sorrow; it honors it, then moves through it. Suited to early mornings, convalescence, or any moment when calm must be consciously chosen rather than stumbled into.