Shepherd Moons is the third studio album by Irish singer, songwriter and musician Enya, released on 4 November 1991 by WEA.

After the unexpected critical and commercial success of her previous album Watermark (1988), Enya embarked on a worldwide promotional tour to support it.

The album was recorded in Ireland and London and continued to display Enya's sound of multi-tracked vocals with keyboards and elements of Celtic and new-age music.

Shepherd Moons received generally positive reviews from critics and became a greater commercial success than Watermark.

As with Watermark, Enya supported the album with a worldwide promotional tour that included several interviews and televised performances.

It became an unexpected commercial success, charting around the world helped by its international top-ten hit, "Orinoco Flow".

However, as with her two previous albums, recording and production had to relocate elsewhere as the Aigle facility lacked the correct equipment to complete the final mix and mastering.

[12] This was down to the greater amount of time Enya took away from the studio, particularly during "quite difficult" moments, while recording the album in comparison to Watermark.

"[3] Writer Molly Burke wrote about the album's artwork: "Shepherd Moons features Enya in what can only be described as an opera gown she could be twenty or forty but her delicate beauty is intact.

Its title, devised by Roma, refers to two inner satellite moons around Saturn discovered in 1980, Pandora and Prometheus,[13] that "protect and preserve the rings very much like a shepherd guiding his flock".

She added, "They talked about the trouble in the world, the strife, the turmoil, but at the end of each verse it simply said "how can I keep from singing?"

Pete Seeger had helped make the song fairly well known in the 1950s by publishing it with Doris Plenn's additional third verse in his folk music magazine Sing Out!

1957), recording it, and mistakenly credited it as a "traditional Quaker hymn" without copyrighting Plenn's verse, thus presenting the entire song as "public domain".

The word was previously referenced in "Orinoco Flow", specifically in the lyric "From the north to the south, Ebudae into Khartoum".

[13] The song features Irish lyrics that describe the excitement of writing in the diary in the morning, "because you don't really know what's going to happen ... it's the expectation of that day really that she was talking about".

[a][7] "Evacuee" was written after she and Roma had seen a BBC documentary about a child evacuated from London during World War II and her subsequent reunion with her parents.

After Enya had written a melody for the song, the two imagined the scenario of the girl saying goodbye at the train station, "waiting until it's all over".

[13] The album's second traditional song, "Marble Halls", is an aria from the 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl by Irish composer Michael William Balfe.

Roma was inspired to name the track by listening to its sound and structure with the melody lines constantly "sweeping in between each other", which created a wind-like effect.

The song refers to the story of a large tsunami destroying the church, and everyone inside, at Magheragallon Beach in Gweedore, where Enya's grandparents are buried.

The theme of loss, something that Enya depicted in Watermark and Shepherd Moons, stemmed from her leaving home at age eleven to attend a strict boarding school, which she described as "devastating".

[18] A promotional box set containing a CD and cassette of the album, plus a 14-page booklet autographed by Roma with her words on each track and lyrics, was released and limited to 1,000 copies.

This commercial success spread across Enya's catalogue; three months after Shepherd Moons, an additional 250,000 copies of Watermark were sold in the same country.

[18] In January 1997, the album was certified quadruple platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for shipment of 1.2 million copies.

On 4 November 2021, the 30th anniversary of the release of Shepherd Moons, a live "watch party" video was broadcast on Enya's YouTube channel.

However, the tracks that focus on her piano playing, like "No Holly for Miss Quinn" and "Shepherd Moons", make the album "succumb to the usual new age doldrums".

The three-year gap between Watermark and Shepherd Moons, she wrote, was "worth it" as the album, like its predecessor, contains "rich sonic tapestries that envelop the listener" that brings a "lush, semi-New Age instrumental atmosphere" that is "only part of the inviting package".

[41] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Ned Raggett acknowledged similarities to Watermark, while also opining that "in terms of finding her own vision and sticking with it", Enya "polished and refined her work to a strong, elegant degree" on Shepherd Moons.