Loreena Mckennitt determined to call the shots
Loreena McKennitt At: Edmonton Folk Music Festival Where: Gallagher Park When: Sunday at 9:10 p.m., mainstage Tickets: Sold out except seniors tickets
Nestled in her D.I.Y. label’s home office just outside Stratford, Ont., Loreena McKennitt was a groundbreaker of indie music management and production from the start.
“I would say that I’m unmanageable,” she jokes over the phone after describing a series of attempts by Warner years back to hook her up with L.A. industry people who flatly refused to let her drive her own career bus. She turned her back instantly on one potential manager who said he’d never let her call the shots. As much as anything else, her independence seems to have come from the same natural inquisitiveness that makes her music so unique.
McKennitt has ridden her rousing Middle-Eastern-infused Celtic creations from a position of selling tapes from the boot of her car in Toronto street markets to delivering more than 14 million albums worldwide, with 1991’s The Visit and 1997’s The Book of Secrets going platinum several times over.
A conversation with McKennitt quickly reveals how purposeful and deliberate she really is, though she politely denies her obvious cleverness, noting, “I’m curious and I’m determined. Both characteristic are very Celtic.”
The clear-voiced soprano, closing out the Folk Fest on Sunday night with her crisp singing, piano, harp and accordion, succinctly describes her musical adventure: “I’ve maintained that what I’m doing is more an act of musical travel writing than it is a finished piece of art.”
Though she nearly became a veterinarian, it’s simply been a matter of following her passions in an ongoing quest for lost ancient knowledge, turning historical anthropology into her own version of modern.
“I’m not a specialist or an academic in this,” the 56-yearold says.
“I think what I do is create the kind of music that I’ve enjoyed listening to myself. When I was living in Morden, Manitoba, in my formative years, my French teacher played some baroque music, and I think that was the first time I heard older music. I was very much enamoured with contemporary folk music at the time, but there was something about the modality that I found innately attractive.
“When I then encountered Celtic music, particularly Irish music — though some of the Scots and English — I was very much smitten by the sound. I wanted to be involved in it in some way.”
At the dawn of the ’90s, McKennitt attended an exhibition in Venice that dramatically altered her concept of Celtic music, redirecting her life forever. “It was huge. It opened up my understanding of who the Celts were. When you think of our First Nations people — the Mohawk, the Huron, the Haida, the Cree — well, the Celts were tribes like that, and they had fanned out across Europe and into Asia Minor. So there were a bunch holed up in Greece, some in what we now call Tuscany, some in Anatoli in Turkey, and throughout the rest of Europe. For example, Milan was a Celtic settlement.
“What was significant about that exhibition is the fall of the Soviet Union had allowed an opening-up of a lot of artifacts that had been tucked away in former Eastern Europe.”
Out of this came a catalogue of artifacts and maps McKennitt calls her Bible. “It became my own hobby and interest, that I educated myself to a degree, that then in turn I married with my own musical skills and talents.”
Three years back, McKennitt concentrated on her Celtic roots with a sort of homecoming album, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and is delving into new ground lately after a three-week trip to Rajasthan, India. The trip will no doubt influence her, as will her upcoming, first tour of Latin America.
“It’s the first step I take to research for the next recording. I’ve yet to really sequester myself with my books and notes and audio and visual material. Because I’ve chosen the path of managing my career and managing this small international enterprise, I have to be quite measured in pacing out when are the creative and artistic windows and when is the pure slogging it out in the managerial department.”
Incidentally, McKennitt’s transplant home of Stratford is also the town where megastar Justin Bieber grew up. While McKennitt has no direct connection to the singer, she notes, “The closest I came the other day in Toronto was when his tour bus drove by. I know people who know the family and so on.”
But, she laughs, “I would be available if he wanted to have a chat any time.”