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Transcribed by Tracie Pascoe Loreena McKennitt is on 'one of those airport, hotel, venue loop tours,' but there's a natural urge to take advantage of the moment and her moment is clearly here. A Wandering Minstrel She (by Liam Lacey - The Globe and Mail, Toronto) It's 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and Loreena McKennitt, the harpist, singer and composer, is talking on the phone from the King Edward Hotel, in Toronto. She and her band played a sold-out concert at Massey Hall the previous night, and she has to head out for the airport again. "This is one of those airport, hotel, venue loop tours" she says wryly. "There's not a lot of time to see the sights. It's a sort of Spinal Tap, Monty Python, Alfred Hitchcock kind of experiences, with thousands and thousands of crossroads and potential logistical screw-ups." Still, there's a natural urge to take advantage of the moment and the 37 year old musician's moment is clearly here. She has recorded five albums on her own Quinlan Road Records, our of her hometown in Stratford, and has finally become an international star with her recording The Visit, which was distributed by Warner Bros. and has sold 500,000 copies worldwide. That success may be eclipsed by her new record The Mask and Mirror (currently, astonishingly, at number six on the Canadian pop charts) which has sold more than 140,000 copies since March. Such numbers would be impressive for a rock record, never mind a record of Shakespeare and Yeats, Arthurian legend, with African, Celtic and Sufi musical influences, all centered on McKennitt's lilting soprano. The music, which does not fir into either record company or radio formats, seems to have taken off largely on good press and word-of-mouth. Her image - long strawberry blonde hair, long dresses and a slightly mysterious Irish lilt to her voice - suggests that of a courtly troubadour; she was, in fact, a street busker just seven years ago. Her music - rippling harp and a soaring Celtic voice - suggests the romance and legend that often fills her songs. Her itinerary, though, suggests nothing so much as serious sleep deprivation. After the Massey Hall concert, the second date of her North American tour, she was on her way to Milwaukee , Winnipeg, Atlanta, New York, Washington, Calgary (May 15th and 16th), San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, (May 25th) and Victoria (May 26th), zigzagging on both sides of the border across the continent, piling up airline points and travel wrinkles. She has agents in Europe and California to set up the dates and a road manager to oversee the truck and crew, but otherwise, McKennitt is also her own manager, and runs her own record company. "I think each of us has the potential to do many things," she says. "It's a question of isolating your functions. When I'm creating, I'm in a very peculiar state of mind, which doesn't have much to do with the administrative part of me. And no, I can't do both of them at the same time. While I'm touring, it isn't the most inspirational time, so I'm administrating during the day and performing at night." The advantage is that she guides her own career. The downside, on a bad day, is that there's no manager to knock on the star's door, pat her on the back and tell her how brilliant she is. "I recognize that my emotional equilibrium affects everyone else's I'm touring with," she says. "So I try to keep things in control. I have my bad days, for sure. But I try to be very protective of the we're on stage, because the kind of music we do is delicate and requires a lot of heart, and we really have to feel connected for it to work." Before opening the North American tour in Montreal last week, she had just finished her first complete tour of Europe, where audiences from Ireland to Spain were already familiar with her recordings. The performances followed a previous tour she took as a traveler, where she spent much of the time in Spain and North Africa, studying the history and learning much about the musical-cultural mix that is reflected in the latest recording. She is fascinated, she says, with the "social and cultural configurations that exist, and how they are preserved over time. That's the reason I work with architectural preservation in Stratford where I live, and why I took my taxi license, so I learn better how people operate in a society." Her latest record is specifically religious in it's themes, those "difficult to talk about questions, who is God, what is the difference between religion and spirituality? The less we know about our collective history the less we understand our own relationships and society." For McKennitt, spirituality needs to be seen in a historical context, which is why she's skeptical of instant enlightenment. "I'm not talking about something you can put on like a cloak. I'm talking about a lifetime of exploration," she says. Unfortunately, spiritual questions are not normal in popular music. When McKennitt the artist is not contemplating the mysteries of the universe, the manager in her is trying to unravel the riddles of the music business. Because they do not know how else to place her neo-traditional music, journalists and record charts such as Billboard magazine, have stuck her in the 'new age' category. This somehow suggests that her music is equivalent to synthesizer pattern music and meditation tapes, and she is not happy about it. "I'd say 90 per cent of the journalists I talked to on this last tour asked me about my 'new age' influences. I don't care, in a market like Canada where I'm reasonably well-known, what people want to call me, but unfortunately, in new areas where I'm not known, there's a stigma attached to new age music, and Billboard insists on putting me on it's new age charts. "I had quite a major discussion with a fellow at Billboard the other day. I said to him "Listen, I've heard of people paying to get records on the charts. I'll pay you to take my name off that chart." The Billboard rep said it couldn't be done; she helps provide some 'weight' to the new age chart, with her music rooted in ages past. The battle will be won at some later date; right now there is a rap at the door, to signal it's time to go. Time for her to head off to Milwaukee, back on the airport-hotel-venue loop. Time to play for another audience, that doesn't care if she's new age, old age, or timeless, but knows what it loves to hear.
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