Editors’ Note: We have watched the Latter-day Saint music industry grow from the days of Marvin Payne and John Canaan going door-to-door in Provo trying to sell their cassettes to our day when some of our artists have hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. We love our Latter-day Saint musicians and want to thank them for the way they lift and bless the Proctors and all of our lives every day. There is not a day that goes by that we don’t listen to someone from this wonderful and talented and powerful circle.
I can’t go on any longer without highlighting and thanking our amazing Latter-day Saint musicians that I have come to love very much. Many of them I know personally, some I would love to know and all of them I admire and am grateful for. I have watched this industry for more than 40 years and I have to say the music has just gotten better and better and more sophisticated and more powerful and more wonderful. Thank you so much all you amazing, wonderful, talented people. I wish I could just call all of you out by name. Oh, I can. And I am starting with three sisters.
Elenyi is a beautiful group of three sisters, Seli, Desi and Ari, who started singing together at ages 10, 9 and 7. They took their first lessons from Dean Kaelin (who was the voice coach for Disney’s High School Musical and a trainer of numbers of amazing talent). I have listened to a series of their songs from early on and they just kept getting better and better and better. They started out calling themselves “Shine” then changed the name to Elenyi, a word from the Greek that means ray of sunlight. They couldn’t be more appropriately named.
All three sisters served missions in South America (two of the sisters were born in Chile) and while one sister was serving, the other two kept singing. All the sisters are bilingual and they love to do some of their numbers in Spanish. They report: “One of our main goals in singing is to be able to touch the lives of others for good. Music was made to help change the mood of people who might be having a bad day, or things just aren’t going right for them.” Thank you Seli, Desi and Ari—you have lifted my day many, many times and I love not only hearing the beautiful blend of your voices, I love to watch the love between you and the beautiful blending of your hearts.
Here’s one of my favorite numbers of theirs, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing and If You Could Hie to Kolob (yes those hymns go together wonderfully) with accompanist Sarah Young. This video has had 19 million views. You deserve it. Please take the time to watch and listen—it will bless your day.
