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Velvet Gown - Iron Soul By Salem Alaton Transcribed By Joanne Longo
"There are aspects of it that are schizophrenic," says the much- traveled McKennitt of her soaring international career, "but thrilling." At the other end of that jet ride to Los Angeles, a 100- piece orchestra waited to record the song whose lyrics she began writing on the plane, and Hollywood producers eagerly anticipated making the Canadian performer's acquaintance. At age 38, McKennitt and her home-grown success are an industry phenomenon. From busking with her Celtic harp and madrigals at a Toronto farmer's market only five or six years ago, she's now a Juno- winner with sales of two million recordings and concert sell-outs from Boston to Barcelona. Pretty improbable for a musician who still stumps the retailers, her latest CD, The Mask and Mirror, variously filed under Pop, Traditional, Folk and New Age. More improbable still is that McKennitt's thriving career is completely self-directed. On stage, she is an ethereal creature in a long velvet gown, her soprano cool and clear as she accompanies herself on harp or keyboards. In her songs, there's a high romantic melancholy, the latest work blending moody folk-rock with the rhythmic themes of medieval Morocco and Spain. Offstage, there's little romantic about the way she runs her Quinlan Road label out of a modest office above a Stratford storefront. With no manager or Canadian agent, she retains an iron grip on every career detail. Her five employees refer all but the most trivial press inquiries to McKennitt, whom some associates jestingly call "Her Ladyship". "I know I'm demanding" and "almost like a driven person," she allows, looking somewhat strung out after a tough rehearsal at the start of another North American tour, her paleness accentuated by a flowing black dress with three-quarter sleeves. No ethereal presence here: the big-boned forearms are muscular, the features sharp and thoughtful. The driven quality was in evidence during the rehearsal, as McKennitt put her five first-rate musicians through their paces onstage at Stratford's Avon Theater. "I need your total and utter focus," she said, later breaking the tension by lapsing into a humorous ditty at the piano. When a synthesizer pedal wasn't working, McKennitt ordered it replaced and added in even tones: "If there's anything else in this organization that is like this pedal, it's time to get it out." But in concert at the Avon that night, the approving roar of the audience tells her she's home - in the performer's role she has loved since childhood. By the second tune, McKennitt is skipping to and fro, her face lit up like a birthday girl's. Between numbers she's chatty at the microphone, occasionally breaking into an arpeggio of laughter. Around rehearsals and concerts, she must find time to comb marketing plans, organize itineraries, and schedule media interviews and meetings with TV producers. Increasingly needing to delegate the work, yet stymied by her need to retain control, McKennitt now faces the approach of a great turmoil: becoming a major pop star. "She will be, it's just a matter of when," says Peter Standish at Warner Bros. Records in L.A. product manager for McKennitt in the United States. That may be the challenge that compels change. The town of Morden sits where Manitoba approaches North Dakota and stretches to infinity. When Loreena was growing up there, the community had 3,500 people and perhaps 15 churches. The work ethic ran deep. Running his livestock business, Jack McKennitt began and ended his workdays in darkness. Wife Irene gave her own long hours as a nurse and mother of two children, the younger of whom was a strong-willed girl. Their Irish roots far away, the family attended a staid United Church "I went to school with students who weren't allowed to have television in their house or wear makeup or dance," says Loreena. Besides hockey, passion was allowed one home in Morden: Music. The McKennitts were not musical, says Irene, who recently moved to Saltspring Island, B.C. after Jack died of cancer in 1992 and son Warren took over the livestock business. But Loreena was different. Starting piano at age 5, going on with voice work and taking up guitar to accompany herself, the girl had a talent "that just seemed to fall out of the sky," says Irene. "We always had little concerts at home." By her teens, Loreena was a pianist both for her school and Chamber of Commerce gatherings. Music already dominated her personal life. "It never seemed to matter very much about having a lot of boyfriends and all that," says Irene. Working with her father for a time after high school grounded Loreena in business practices. When she settled in Winnipeg in the mid-'70s to make her way with music, Irene fretted but knew there was no arguing the point. Nothing happened very quickly. "I didn't really have any agenda when I started out to do what I'm doing, except that I loved the Celtic sound," says McKennitt. Some alchemy of ancestral memory and spiritual urge was at work whenever McKennitt brushed against Celtic culture, at the folk clubs of Winnipeg and in recordings such as Renaissance of the Celtic Harp by Breton harpist Alan Stivell. During this rather unformed time, McKennitt followed a boyfriend to Toronto. The relationship didn't last, and in 1981, having auditioned for the Stratford Festival, she moved to the rural community and became part of the theater-festival scene, composing and singing. Despite the Stivell influence McKennitt didn't get her first harp until a year or so before preparing for her first self-made recording, Elemental, which appeared in 1985. She also picked up a book called How to Make and Sell Your Own Record by an Arizona-based former artist manager named Diane Sward Rapaport. Know your audience, the text insisted, and McKennitt started writing down names whenever she performed. By the time her acoustically-backed folk narratives for Elemental were ready, she had several hundred addresses. A second cassette two years later, To Drive the Cold Winter Away, featured traditional tunes, recorded in a monastery in Ireland and an historic church in Ontario. but it was the third work, Parallel Dreams, in 1989, that brought the epiphany. Recalling early musical forms from the British Isles but extending them in a subtly rock- driven way, McKennitt had emerged as a highly original artist. By now, she was selling more than 30,000 tapes through her handcrafted network, with nearly 70 cents profit on every dollar. "It's almost a classic story of what any independent-label artist should do," says author Rapaport. When Warner Music Canada signed McKennitt in 1991, she retained the right for her Quinlan Road label to continue its own mail-order distribution out of Stratford. Worldwide, she's already Warner's biggest Canadian artist, but even that is only the beginning, according to Dave Tollington, senior vice president at the Toronto office: "There's the belief that we could very easily double her sales around the world." As for the alacrity with which the parent company in L.A. seized on McKennitt, says Tollington, "we've never seen anything like it up here. They've completely adopted her as their own." The rub is that if music gave McKennitt power over her own life, the demands of her musical success often seems to take it away. Long months on the road deprive her of such pleasures as going for a run with Julius, her Labrador - Bouvier, and Maeve, her Doberman-setter cross. The cottage she owns in rural Ireland sits lonely. Her social life is often narrowed to essentials: a couple of her closest friends, Tim Fowkes and Niema Ash from London, England, travel with her to sell recordings and posters. Getting emergency calls to come to L.A. - like the one from the Santa Clause producers - means her exposure is reaching new peaks. Yet, even to savor that would mean slowing down. "I'm up to my neck in so many things all the time that there hasn't been a lot of time to sit back and digest," concedes McKennitt. The result is a strain on personal recuperation and creative time - time that's important to McKennitt's exploration of musical styles, and of the spiritual elements that inform her work. Soon, she ackowledges, it will be time "to either find the right people or train my own people to grow as the demands are being placed on me." She hasn't yet - and her reluctance to do so hides under her attention to sales and promotion. Success has its comforts, of course. McKennitt won't reveal her income, but her hefty overhead for staff and tour musicians appears to leave her something like a high corporate salary. Mother Irene's dander gets up when the press suggests her daughter is rich: "Money is not the main vision in her life, music is her life." To date, nothing else appears remotely in competition. McKennitt vaguely alludes to seeing someone lately, but no one seems to have clapped eyes on the man, and the claim frankly surprises people close to her. Ask about children and she laughs self-consciously. "I think that you can't have it all, and you go through life making choices," says McKennitt, who doesn't rule out family but makes it sound unlikely. As for a romantic partnership, "I don't fret over it one way or another, except if I'm in a relationship which isn't working out." When that happened in the past, it consumed energy that could instead have advanced her career. Now it's clear she's not prepared "to sacrifice my being engaged in the world for just any relationship." Indeed, to friend Paul Farrelly she once characterized her deal with the record company as "getting married." Farrelly is executive director of The Ireland Fund of Canada, a charity McKennitt has supported for years. Last fall, she was again the star performer for the Fund's gala dinner in Toronto. McKennitt had squeezed in the date before leaving on a half-night's sleep for consecutive concerts in Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, Minneapolis, Minn., Madison, Wis., Chicago and so on for another six weeks. After McKennitt and ensemble had done their five songs, Farrelly proudly announced that the singer was donating $20,000 to the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland's County Monaghan, a retreat where artists could leave the wider world behind to consult their muses. Pinned in her own relentless whirl of recording, touring and promoting, it might be time for McKennitt to book that retreat herself one of these days.
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