Born: 1957, Morden, MB
Debut: 1985
Breakthrough: 1991
Pop Breakthrough: 1997
Genre: New Age, Celtic, World
Studio Albums and Singles
1985: Elemental
1985: To Drive the Cold Winter Away
1989: Parallel Dreams
1991: The Visit
• Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album
• 4x Platinum
• Singles: “The Lady of Shalott”, “All Souls Night“, “Courtyard Lullaby”, “Greensleeves”
1994: The Mask and the Mirror
• Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album
• 3x Platinum
• Singles: “The Bonny Swans”, “Santiago”, “The Dark Night of the Soul”, “The Mystic’s Dreams”
1995: A Winter Garden (EP)
• Gold
• Singles: “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen”
1997: The Book of Secrets
• 4x Platinum
• Singles: “The Mummers’ Dance” (#10), “Marco Polo”, “Dante’s Prayer”
2006: An Ancient Muse
• Platinum
• Singles: “Caravanserai”, “Penelope’s Song”
2008: A Midwinter Night’s Dream
• Singles: “The Seven Rejoices of Mary”, “Noel Nouvelet!”
2010: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
With an angelic soprano voice, expertise of musical composition, love of classic poetry, and mastery of the piano, harp, and accordion, Loreena McKennitt became Canada’s premier new age recording artist. Beginning with what limited resources she had, she gradually rose to fame domestically and internationally. Six years after her debut she become a household name and another six years she scored a Top 10 hit on the national singles chart. She has managed to sell 14 million records worldwide.
Small town Manitoba-born McKennitt was the daughter of a livestock dealer and nurse. Early on she wanted to become a veterinarian but, born out of an appreciation for Celtic music, she learned to play the harp. In Winnipeg, she studied piano with Olga Friesen and voice with Elma Gislason. She performed in musicals and at folk clubs and sang at the Winnipeg Folk Festival when she was 17.
When she was 24, Loreena relocated to Stratford, Ontario where she launched her musical career. She began busking in Toronto, Vancouver, and London, England to earn money for her debut album, Elemental, which was released in 1985 the year that she performed at the World Expo in Japan. McKennitt established her own independent record label, Quinlan Road. All of her albums were released on this label.
Before recording, McKennitt likes to do thorough research which forms the basis of the album’s concept. She travelled to Ireland to become informed and inspired by the country’s history, folklore, culture, and geography before composing and recording her first few albums.
She released albums at two year intervals: a Christmas album in 1987 and Parallel Dreams in 1989. By this time, she was attracting the attention of the National Film Board of Canada who asked her to provide music for their documentary The Burning Times about witch hunts in Europe.
She reworked the main theme into “Tango for Evora” including it on her 1991 release The Visit which became her breakthrough album, selling a million copies worldwide and attaining 4x platinum sales in Canada. The album includes a musical rendition of Albert Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” and her interpretation of “Greensleeves”. It was perhaps the album opener, “All Souls Night”, which became the most famous track. “Bonny Portmore” was featured in the Highlander series. The album won a Juno award. McKennitt performed at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
She toured Europe with Mike Oldfield in 1993 and remained in Spain to study the Galicia region, its Celtic and Arabic roots, shaping the inspiration for her next studio album, The Mask and the Mirror. The 1994 release sold over 300,000 copies in Canada and won her second Juno. A five-track Christmas EP came out in 1995 which included a musical adaptation of “Snow”, a poem by Canada’s foremost poet, Archibald Lampman.
In 1997, McKennitt released The Book of Secrets and scored her first hit single, “The Mummer’s Dance”, which peaked at #10 on the national RPM charts. It was a hit in the United States as well, helping the album to attain double-platinum status south of the border. It matched sales of The Visit in Canada. At the height of her success, however, tragedy struck.
In 1998, Loreena’s fiancé Ronald Rees, his brother Richard, and their close friend Gregory Cook took a boat out on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron. With echoes of the hurricane-sinking of the steamship Asia in 1882, an accident took the lives of the three men. McKennitt was plunged into mourning. At the time, she was working on a live album (from performances in Toronto and Paris) and decided to donate proceeds to her newly-founded Cook-Rees Memorial Fund for Water Search and Safety. After the release of the album, McKennitt announced her retreat from recording to grieve and limited her performances to charitable and special events only. In 2002, she performed for the Golden Jubilee of the Queen in Manitoba. In 2003, she joined Rita MacNeil and Philip Glass at the National Arts Centre for a concert sponsored by environmental organization The Sierra Club.
Deeply affected by the drowning, it took eight years before she felt ready to record again. The result was 2006′s platinum-seller An Ancient Muse the composition and recording of which was preceded by travel to and studies about The Silk Road. Two years later, the Christmas album A Midwinter Night’s Dream appeared. In 2010, McKennitt released The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
Copyright 2011 by the Canadian Music Blog
