Loreena McKennitt photo by Richard Haughton
Loreena McKennitt Focuses on Community For “The Road Back Home”
The Road Back Home is a live album released by multi-platinum selling and Juno Award-winning Celtic and Folk artist Loreena McKennitt that arrived on March 8th, 2024. It follows 2022’s seasonal live album, Under a Winter’s Moon, and was recorded at four folk festivals in Southern Ontario in the summer of 2023, just before McKennitt set out on the anniversary The Visit Revisited Tour. As the title The Road Back Home might suggest, McKennitt was close to home turf for these folk festivals, but there’s a larger sense in which she revisited her early days as a performing artist, choosing songs with which she had a long history and even some which she had played live in years gone by, but never recorded before.
Performing with her colleagues The Bookends, a band who are also local to the region, McKennitt selected the set carefully to take audiences on a specific journey, and the same journey is recreated in the arc of the live album. It’s one that concludes in a way close to McKennitt’s heart, mirroring her earlier years at folk festivals, when musicians and audiences would sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” together as a finale. That takes on an extra dimension for McKennitt, as she intentionally brings a sense of community to her events with opportunities for people to sing together, both things that she finds are often lacking in modern life. I spoke with Loreena McKennitt about performing and recording at festivals, the importance of communal gatherings, and her outlook on being an independent artist at this time.
Americana Highways: I realize that you were about to set off on The Visit Revisited Tour just after these folk festival performances in Canada. Was it a nice thing to have a less formal setting for those shows?
Loreena McKennitt: It was a very small version of what we’re doing now, just in the neighborhood, so you could go home and sleep in your own bed!
AH: I didn’t realize that it was so close to home, giving that extra, homey feeling. I know that The Bookends, the band who performed with you at the festival, are also geographically tied, having met through their town. Were they also near home?
Loreena McKennitt: Oh, yes, we were all traveling together. In fact, The Fischers just moved from across the street from The Watsons! They lived across the street from each other for a number of years. The Fischers had come from Calgary and they slowly discovered their mutual love for an interest in Celtic music to the extent that they put this band together.
AH: I feel like the theme of The Road Back Home is a sense of place, which can be different for different people, but that’s a nice echo in the fact that all of you were, in fact, at home. Did you feel different performing because of that?
LMcK: For me, the word “home” in this whole experience goes back to my early days of falling in love with Celtic music, back in Manitoba in the late 70s, when I was part of a folk club. We got together in the back of this woodworking shop and we’d swap albums and songs, and learn pieces together. So it’s about the experiences that you have with people that forms another kind of home, not just a place. Especially if that’s repeated, and especially if they make a huge imprint on you.
Once I moved to Ontario in the 80s, I started to leave more of the traditional side of things behind. By 1991 when I attended this exhibition in Venice, the largest exhibition that had ever been assembled on the Celts, that’s when I really started traveling about and getting inspiration in different ways. One of the reasons that I left Manitoba was largely because there were not traditional musicians here in Stratford when I came. Now, we’ve got The Bookends!
AH: What led up to choosing these particular festivals to play in?
LMcK: We hadn’t booked a European tour yet that summer, because we weren’t sure where covid was going at the time when we would have had to book it. Instead, we’ll be going to Europe this summer. So, I had last summer vacant, which was nice. I’d had a number of these folk festivals approach me over the years, but it would be almost impossible with the other group of musicians who I work with who are based in LA and other places. I thought, “Why don’t I just speak to The Bookends and see if we can work up a set?” When it got closer to the summer, I thought, “Why don’t we just record these, even if it’s just for our archives?” But we always record with the view that we may want it to become something more, which we did.
AH: Was the recording process that you used for your live album, Under a Winter’s Moon, similar? Or do you always record shows in the same way?
LMcK: We’ve often recorded concerts while on tour just to have archival documents. We formally recorded our performance at The Royal Albert Hall in London. We do this as a matter of course.
AH: The sound quality on this album is exceptionally good. It’s something that people really strive for, but that’s not easy to attain. To get a great live sound at a festival is even more complex.
LMcK: We work with an engineer, Jeff Wolpert, who we’ve worked with on all our live recordings, even in Paris and Toronto in 1998. He was at the Alhambra and The Royal Albert Hall. He’s very, very good. He knows a lot of the techniques. I think there was one piece where we went into a space in Stratford to re-record, but that was the only one. He’s a fantastic engineer from the live standpoint. I think we almost could have allowed a little bit more of the ambience to come in. You can hear a little bit of it overlapping in the applause and I’m laughing. I think that enhances the sense of its visceral nature.
AH: Does the track order that we have reflect the order of performance at the festival?
LMcK: It’s pretty much what the setlist was. There was another piece that we didn’t put on that I play, called “The Blacksmith.” We set that piece aside largely because we knew that we wanted to put this on vinyl and that would be too long for the sides. But that’s pretty much how the show went down.
AH: I got that sense because I can see a real emotional arc in the way that the songs fit together and that seemed like a meaningful choice for a live show as well. You have introductory, exploratory feelings in the early songs, then you get into more of a reflecting space, then the energy really pops towards the end, “Salvation Contradiction” being a very energetic piece. There’s a very positive feeling to the way things build up, also with the double closing pieces.
LMcK: It was really, really tricky to plan. When we decided to do this, I didn’t have the time to learn new pieces. I played along in a very modest way on their instrumentals, but I didn’t have time to learn lyrics for a new song. So the pieces that I gravitated to had to be pieces that I’d learned at one time or another. As I do with all my other studio recordings, for the sequencing of things, the sentiment and the feeling are huge. It has to feel a bit like a journey for people. The sequencing is a very important part. I worked with The Bookends to review various instrumental pieces that I felt might be complementary.
The closing “Si Bheag, So Mhor/Wild Mountain Thyme” sequence is a tip of the hat to my earliest days in Folk music and Celtic music. When I performed at the Winnipeg Folk Festival back in the 70s, at the end of the festival, everyone would come on stage and sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” together with the audience. It was this big, communal moment that was just beautiful. When the music died away, everybody picked up their blankets and went home, and you knew that you weren’t going to feel that again until next year. There’s something incredibly significance about these rarer communal experiences that happen, particularly through music. In this day and age, there are generations who are with devices. I’m a card-holding luddite, very proudly so [laughs], so this was me saying, “I really would love everyone to join us in singing together. And those of you who have never, ever sung with somebody else before, and you feel a little timid, you have lots of company here. Get up your nerves and do it!”
We also did this on our tour in the US and Canada. It was a whole different repertoire, but at the end, I tacked on “Wild Mountain Thyme” and I printed the chorus in the program so that people had the lyrics. It was a very, very touching moment when people got up the nerve to sing. I almost cried a few times! For me, it was very poignant, because I thought, “When is the last time that folks felt this feeling, at a time when we are so at odds with each other? This is a moment where, hopefully, we can connect with our common humanity.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zT_Xiu0Quvc%3Fsi%3DCzTTHe3nUVIS1-xQ
AH: I think there’s some reason to feel hopeful about that engagement with communities of music, though I agree, it can be hard to come by. There’s the big rush of emotion that fans and musicians felt returning to live events after Covid, but I’ve also started hearing about communal singing groups popping up that are multi-faith and essentially secular, allowing people to just come together. Good for you for offering a gateway drug to communal singing!
LMcK: [Laughs] I’m doing my part!
AH: There’s a psychological difference, I think, for fans, attending a festival than attending an indoor concert, with different emotional associations. Is performing at a festival a very different experience for you, personally, than you might have performing on a tour?
LMcK: Oh, for sure. There’s a very different basket of variables in outdoor performances. You have the unpredictability of the elements and the sounds that can crop up. Whereas in a concert hall, you’re sitting in a pristine environment, with the lights down, and your visually focused on the stage. You’re hearing what’s intended from the stage. What’s significant about a festival is that all of the opposite is true. You may be sitting on the ground, on a blanket, next to people, their dog, and their baby. The focus is not on a pristine experience, but rather this rich, communal experience. I keep coming back to that “communal” concept because I think we’re in an era where we’re living too singularly.
The Greeks have that fabulous word “Agora” where people would go and talk about things of common interest. In a way, I think it’s more enjoyable and more enriching to go and watch a film with other people than to watch one by oneself. This whole business of our singular experiences is denying us something that is richer. When it comes to festivals, I just love the whole array of sensory things going on! There’s a breathing type of thing between the performers and the audience, but it’s very different thing than being in a venue.
I love performing in venues, too, where there’s such a pristine environment and you can focus on such detail. You can focus on the last “t” on a word, and people are right there with you, which you would not often be able to do in a festival setting. That’s why I think, in a festival setting, the repertoire needs to match that festival setting. “Bonnie Portmore” or “On a Bright May Morning” are really the most vulnerable pieces in that set, even more so than “Searching for Lambs,” which had a certain strength to it.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iKt_EQWMICM%3Fsi%3DxL1WiUQdjxXtcI4D
AH: You’ve probably noticed that being an independent artist is much more common now than it was when you started out as a young person, and you’ve been a trail blazer in terms of owning your own business. Have you noticed more indie artists asking you for advice on that in recent years?
LMcK: From time to time, yes. The unfortunate thing is that when I started out, it was a very different era in the music business. If I was to start out now, as I did back in the mid-80s, I don’t see how there could be a path for success. There are two parts of the music industry. There’s the music-making and commodification side, where you can sell your music, and then there’s the performing and touring side. Once the unregulated internet came in, it killed the first half of the business. I’m lucky since I’m a legacy artist. My career got built up to considerable height by 1998, with The Book of Secrets, but when I came back to release An Ancient Muse in 2006, it was astounding how catastrophic the industry had fallen as a result of technology not offering the proper protection for the creative class.
I feel like a spoil-sport, but I feel like there’s not much framework for people to have a viable career, based on just the music-making side. That is, until there is a much stronger regulation of the tech companies. There’s been very predatory kind of behavior from Spotify, or Google play. There’s not a viable, predictable model to make music. That’s why artists like myself who are still in the game, and probably legacy artists, are either regurgitating a lot of what they used to do, or are making cheap-and-cheerful recordings like The Road Back Home, which I love.
But at the same time, I went and did a lot of research in Rajasthan, in India, a handful of years ago, and I had a whole trunk full of ideas, but to do a recording like An Ancient Muse of Mask and Mirror, they are expensive, since I’m bringing in all kinds of musicians, or even small orchestras or choirs. There’s just not a business argument for it. Unless you end up being like Taylor Swift, it’s a very perilous world. You could tour all the time, but the problem with touring all the time is that you don’t become a citizen, or have a family, and that wasn’t what I wanted. So, I’ve deliberately paced out my tours so I can be a citizen of my community and I can be home for my family.
Thanks very much for speaking with us, Loreena McKennitt. You can discover more on her website here:
Website: https://loreenamckennitt.com/
