SPILL FEATURE: THE ROAD BACK HOME – A CONVERSATION WITH LOREENA McKENNITT

THE ROAD BACK HOME

A CONVERSATION WITH LOREENA McKENNITT

“I am well, thank you, there’s lots going on, and for the most part we are in good health and doing things we love, so you can’t complain,” said Loreena McKennitt to start our recent conversation.

This is one of the many incredible things about her, she is remarkably down to earth and a lovely person with whom to spend some time chatting. Although Loreena McKennitt has maintained worldwide fame as a brilliant musician, composer, and artist for over 30 years, some of us were lucky enough to see her with her harp busking in St. Lawrence Market in the early 1980s. Some of us can even remember buying her debut album, in cassette form, from her in said market. And now, she is releasing a stunning new album, The Road Back Home, which are songs that were recorded during her 2023 Festival tour.

“I should begin by saying it was an accidental project. A year ago, at this time, I had no idea this was going to happen. We were supposed to have been on tour in Europe last summer… I delayed the summer tour by a year. Having the summer open, I said to myself, ‘there’s this wonderful group in town called The Bookends, a Celtic group. Maybe this would be the summer I could go and perform at those festivals I had been asked to do for a number of years.’ Including the Celtic one in Goderich. So, we got to assembling the material, and there was no question that the exercise of going back to the very beginning was a road going back home. Insofar as ‘home’ can be explained in many ways. Not just the building you go to sleep in, but it might be the fabric of people you see every day, woven with rituals and traditions.”

For McKennitt home is Winnipeg, where it all started. Although studying to be a veterinarian, she was captured by the folk music bug and a change in careers was happening for her.

“When I look back to the very first years in Winnipeg, and I got exposed to Celtic music, at this folk club on Main Street at The Woodwright shop, I was immediately smitten by it. In those Sunday evening sessions, we’d be sharing pieces we had been learning from each other, playing them together.”

And all of this led to some decisions McKennitt had to make about the tour, songs, and new album.

“So having come through this long journey that has led me through the history of The Celts, through all parts of the world, this has been a very interesting experience to go back to the very beginnings.  When I saw the artwork [of the album], I also felt the title should marry the artwork and this is kind of the order of the ways things happened. The festivals, the decision to make a recording, putting it together, getting the cover art. This is like the road back home.”

PURCHASE THE ROAD BACK HOME

The new album features some new songs by McKennitt. Although the songs themselves, are not new, McKennitt’s arrangements and recording of the songs is a welcome addition to her ever-growing catalogue. The songs also allowed McKennitt to revisit some old friends in the form of songs.

“I just stumbled upon them along the way. “Mary And The Soldier” is a very old one that I had learned by the 1980s, I in fact learned to play that with another wonderful folk musician and actor Cedric Smith who is from Perth County Conspiracy. For a few years we were performing together and that was a piece that we did. I made my first recording in 1985 and then I went busking at The St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, and “Mary And The Soldier” was one of four pieces I played over and over. “As I Roved Out”, that was on one of The Planxty recordings, so those early groups, Planxty, [The] Bothy Band, Steeleye Span, and Alan Stivell were very much there in those years in Winnipeg in the 1970s.  I was listening to that, and I collected a few of these along the way.”

The reason for dipping back into these older songs was very straightforward for McKennitt.

“A lot of it was just pragmatics. I didn’t have time to learn a whole bunch of new material. I manage my own career and right now we are about to go on a five week European tour, there’s been all this other stuff going on with the regular musicians, so forging together the musicians for the folk festivals and the material I was already familiar with, which I knew from my busking days, it was going to be an easier way then going back and learning pieces from scratch.”

“When I moved from Manitoba to Stratford in 1981 to work at the Festival Theatre, after the folk club at Winnipeg, I soon realised that it was impossible to really appreciate folk music, without understanding and appreciating the social, economic, and political circumstances of that time. So, I took a correspondence course on Irish History from The University Of Waterloo, just as I was moving to Stratford and then in 1991 I attended this exhibition, which was the most extensive exhibition ever assembled about the Celts. I learned at the time that there was not just this mad collection of anarchists from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but a vast collection of tribes that had fanned out across Europe and Asia Minor and dated back to 500 BC. So, at the point of my third recording of Parallel Dreams, I was looking at the traditional community and I thought ‘they do this so well, I don’t really think I can do this repertoire so well, moreover I am really interested in studying the history of the Celts. When I went to the exhibition and learned about these other geographic regions, it was more of a geographical travel writing. I am going to pursue the history, learn what I can and then stitch that into songs and music,’ and the recording became almost an archival document or active music travel writing that represented that path of research.”

“I just kept pursuing the history of The Celts, even with An Ancient Muse (2006), the next chapter was to go to Greece, Turkey. I had just come from Italy and the only time I almost stopped or slowed down was 2019 and I have some family that needed my attention, and also, I felt as I witnessing it becoming more of a touring industry (the music business), I thought ‘I don’t want to be on the road all the time.’ And we could be on the road all the time, because frankly we have the whole world to tour, but I wanted to re-evaluate and then the pandemic hit, and that was another reason to say ‘ok, what is this going to do? How will this change things?’ I was planning on taking a break for a year or two anyway, so it has been a slow ramp up to get back touring. The unregulated internet broke one part of the industry, and there is not a convincing business argument to go making music of the complexity of An Ancient Muse and Book Of Secrets, where I am weaving an expense list of instruments. So, I have had to say, ‘what can I do?’ It is too expensive to make now. We get 10 cents for 10,000 plays or 1.00013 cents on Google Play, it might be good for Spotify, or the record companies or even the consumer but it is the death knell for the creative class.”

When it comes to hopes for the album, McKennitt remains very grounded and clear.

“I have always tried to be careful I didn’t have too many ambitions for my recordings. In one sense just to do them and not release them, I feel has always been a gratifying experience that far. And then if I put them out there and people enjoy them or get something out of them, that’s huge. It is an odd thing to say, but I haven’t done it just for the audience. There is a lot of gratification that comes before that.”

But more to the point, McKennitt sees music as a participatory sport, not just observing from the sidelines. She makes a strong argument for the communal aspect of music.

“Playing music and singing together with other people is an incredibly special and powerful thing. I really encourage people, if they haven’t experienced it or if they have to consider joining a choir, or learning an instrument and playing in a band, and just being involved with music. It is also why I invited the audience to sing “Wild Mountain Thyme”, the chorus, with us. I have to say there were a couple of nights, I could hardly keep my composure. I was so touched by that communal experience of all these voices and all these souls coming together in this special moment and it will never be repeated like that. It’s just something so exquisite.”

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Photo Credit: Richard Haughton

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