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The Spirit That Sends Her Transcribed by Tracie Pascoe
Her hands are the first clue. Stout, strong and covered with sandy freckles, they look as if they'd be more at home on a farm than on stage, delicately coaxing musical rhapsody from the harp and piano. Loreena McKennitt is an artist who does not deliver the commonplace, however. Her work transcends many boundaries and embodies many contradictions. Beyond her impossibly rich talent as singer, songwriter and musician, the 37 year old has acute market savvy. As evinced from her start, busking on the streets of Toronto 11 years ago, to selling half-a-million copies of her last album, The Visit, she is a strong business woman who understands grassroots marketing. McKennitt is known for her delicate renditions of traditional Celtic tunes and spirited original works. Yet on her new album, The Mask and Mirror (released in March), she dips her fingers in deep waters of Spanish and North African culture, combining Celtic Mysticism with deeply moving African rhythm. Sitting in her Toronto hotel suite, she slips off her shoes and curls into a comfortable position. The luxury of discussing inspiration and philosophy doesn't come often in her workday schedule, devoted primarily to the administration of her career. She outlines her twin roles as creator and business person. "This is a very demanding configuration," she says, "but the chances of things working in a relatively co-ordinated and cohesive way are actually better this way." To borrow an image from author Arthur Koestler, who mused in his book The Sleepwalkers that this age of specialists "is in need of creative trespassers," it's fair to say that McKennitt has been creatively trespassing most of her life. Raised in the small town of Morden, Man., McKennitt showed an early affinity for the arts and had a love for the outdoors. She wanted to be a veterinarian , though she also trained in piano, studied theatre and later worked as a composer, actor and singer in Stratford, Ont., her home since 1981. All this was before building her career as a harpist, an instrument she picked up in 1983. McKennitt honed her skills on the ancient instrument as a busker in Toronto. Soon, she was organizing and selling out her shows and finally recording and marketing her first three CDs (Elemental, To Drive the Cold Winter Away and Parallel Dreams) through her company, Quinlan Road. After skillfully managing her own career, McKennitt's next "trespass" was into the boardroom of record companies who came calling. "I had built things up to a certain degree myself and I was making some very good money, even though I was only selling 35,000 units," she says, explaining her need to remain involved in the business end of things. "The profit of what you seen on 35,000 units, when you do it yourself is good. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't compromising myself by entering into an arrangement." Through a careful grassroots marketing approach (handing out flyers and placing tapes in bookshops, cafes and hairdressers' salons), McKennitt learned that when her music is heard, it sells. She passed that knowledge on to record company execs at Warner Music Canada, with whom she entered into a deal, keeping the right to sell and distribute her products through Quinlan Road. Her fourth album and first with Warner, 1991s The Visit, earned her a Juno Award, went double platinum in Canada (200,000 copies sold) and sold more than a half million copies worldwide. For The Mask and Mirror, McKennitt and Warner have planned to distribute through the usual retail channels, as well as through a U.S. lifestyle store called Natural Wonders. In addition, McKennitt has set up a toll-free order number connecting to her Office in Stratford. Celtic purists will be the first to note McKennitt's latest creative trespass. The Mask and Mirror features classical poetry set to music with the words of St. John of the Cross, Shakespeare and Yeats, as she's done before (Yeats' "Stolen Child" on Elemental), but the Celtic sensibilities are now merged with darkly exotic Moorish rhythms. The album's sounds transcend genres and time, with heady Moroccan beats swirling about McKennitt's immaculate voice as she weaves tales of mysticism, love , God and magic. It's all delicately, and sometimes aggressively, matched with a background of harp, accordion, violin, electric guitar and a plethora of percussion. "I didn't want to restrict my performing and creative career to all things Celtic," McKennitt explains. "I didn't think that was necessary, although that still remains very much a part of who I am." The Mask and Mirror will likely have critics tripping over superlatives, trying to find the appropriate words to describe the perfect clarity of her voice and depth of her music. McKennitt says she's searching for unity and similarity among music, images and cultures. Building bridges rather than walls, she is assisted by longtime comrade Brian Hughes who lends his ear as album co-producer and his guitar to all a fervently contemporary edge to tunes such as "The Bonny Swans." The song is a ballad about a woman who drowns her sister for love, beautifully set off by the melancholy, musical call-and-response shared by Hughes' guitar and Hugh Marsh's violin. McKennitt is not entirely sure what prompted her to shift her musical gaze. She simply recalls a lingering image of a Spanish market - one she's sure she's never seen. "I started studying Spanish history and quickly learned that prior to 1500 there were primarily three communities in Spain. The Judaic, the Moorish Islamic and the Christian. I was quite curious to see to what degree these religious communities were able to live together in this relatively small country, confronted all the time with a different interpretation of who God is. To me, it threw out the question, 'What is the difference between religion and spirituality?' " "I'm very much preoccupied by this subject," McKennitt continues. "It's woven in different ways through my music and through the recordings' themes and ideas. It doesn't surprise me that people are drawn to my music, to some degree, intellectually. I also feel that when I sing, I really try to capture the feeling that one is a vehicle. My body or my voice is an instrument - it's the spirit or soul that resonates." An example of this resonance can be found on The Mask and Mirror's 'Santiago,' a 15th century Spanish instrumental composed for a pilgrimage to a Christian shrine. Using no lyrics, McKennitt's voice interprets the melody with a celebratory lightness and hypnotic insistence that hints at the depth and power of the search for spiritual truth. A renaissance woman through and through, it's not surprising McKennitt is concerned about what she sees as the rootlessness of contemporary society. She turns to the past for a more complete vision of spirituality and expression. You can see it in her dress - rich velvets, Victorian heels, wildly tousled hair. And her performances, where the ambient mood created by a blackened stage lit by candelabras and sheathed with tapestries, are rarely broken by conversation. McKennitt effectively casts a spell where songs flow one after another and the audience is drawn into her reverie. The completeness of her vision is striking. McKennitt explains that her music is lovingly rooted in her research. She scours book stores around the world to enrich her knowledge and now takes a DAT machine with her on travels to record local sounds. Other inspirations are less tangible. Snuggling into her chair, she recounts a haunting memory of a sunrise over a thousand-foot sand dune. "The simplicity of this expanse of sand and sky and a silence that was just deafening... I just stood there and thought, 'God this is amazing,' " she says, drawing a deep breath. Driven by "unbelievable curiosity that just won't leave me alone," McKennitt eschews the celebrity status that is now knocking at hr door. Her music is a way to document the things she's learning in her life and success, she says, is an ephemeral feeling of making a true connection with a time, a place or person. "I think the subject matter and the themes are really important and who I am, specifically, is less important," she says. "The Sufis have an expression of personal refinement that is expressed as a tarnished mirror. As you try to perfect yourself, you polish the mirror of you soul," she explains, referring to a devout Islamic religious order she is researching. "I think it's a lovely image. I would say I'm madly polishing this unbelievably tarnished mirror and hoping something in it shines forth and is of some value to people."
For more information on Unicorns please read The Unicorn Connection.
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