Irish Soul

By Peter Feniak, from Saturday Night magazine, February 1994

Transcribed By Brian Brewer

"Two years ago I couldn't get a mortgage. I couldn't get a credit card," Loreena McKennitt is saying over coffee in a booth at Bentley's, a regular hang-out of hers in Stratford, Ontario. There's no need for the striking red-haired singer to say out loud that all of that has changed now. On paper she's a millionaire just from the sales of The Visit, her Celtic-flavoured album of lyrical lament; since its release in 1991 it's sold more than half a million copies. 300,000 outside Canada. Since McKennitt almost single-handedly built her own career, this recent record-company-endorsed success is not about to turn her head. As she confided to a writer from Elle, "The music industry is a machine for mythmaking. The danger is you could fall in love with your own myth".

McKennitt herself has never fallen short in the myth-making department. Take the Elizabethan image conjured up by her album covers and concert wardrobe, and the much-admired musical settings she has created for classic poetry (a list that begins with Shakespeare and runs through Tennyson, Blake, and Yeats, and, that, as one reviewer wrote, sends her audiences "racing home to dig out the Norton Anthology of English Literature"). Think of the melancholy voice lifting over the arc of her Celtic harp, an instrument of wandering minstrels. McKennitt has wrapped her art in such cloak- swirling romance that it's far easier to picture her wandering towering cliffs and peering out to sea than hammering out exceptional contracts with record company brass in Toronto and LA. But hammer she does, keeping the romance where it belongs, in the music and on the stage. "This is one woman", says another, highly placed in the Canadian music industry, "who really has her shit together".

The first little crack in the myth is something McKennitt's reviewers and fans generally just don't notice. She grew up neither in Ireland, nor in Stratford, Ontario, the theatrical little town she now considers home, but on the south-central plains of Manitoba, in the town of Morden. Her mother, Irene, still lives there; her father, Jack McKennitt, who ran a thriving livestock business, died of cancer in 1992, the week before his daughter appeared in duet with the cellist Ofra Harnoy on the Juno awards.

While there's Irish in the family heritage, the pretty and prosperous town of Morden, a ninety-minute drive from Winnipeg across farmland as flat as a billiard table, seems unlikely to inspire a Celtic fixation. Begin by looking out at a sparse surface of grain fields and poplar bluffs, and your eyes soon turn upwards to the immense and limitless sky. Travel west to Carman on Highway 3, then straight south at the right-angle turn. At Morden the highway stops and the flatness ends at a small crescent of hills west of town.

Irene McKennitt pulls into a gravel parking lot on Thornhill Street in a late-model Taurus ("My husband was a Ford man"). She is vital, white-haired, and compact. A career nurse, she now coordinates home-care services in the local district. On the screened-in porch of the Log Cabin Restaurant, she reviews family history and landmarks of her daughter's success. The first, in a mother's eyes, being Loreena's birth: "We were so excited when she was born... Warren, our son, is three years older and then along came a girl, with red hair just like her father's. We had family in California who told us of a little girl named Loreena. And it just seemed to go with McKennitt."

Her daughter took to performing early, leaping about gaily in the then dominant form for prairie girls, Highland dancing. A Sunday drive ended that: the McKennitt's car collided with another at the crest of a hill. Loreena came out of the hospital with her legs in casts. Exit Highland flings. Her grandmother sent over the family piano and Loreena began music lessons. She was five years old.

She studied classical piano for ten years and voice for five. She sang in choirs, played piano for them, played the organ in the United Church. The local music teacher, Olga Friesen, was "a very strong example" for Loreena; a mother of three, Friesen directed the Morden Children's Choir, painted, cooked, put on musicals. (Friesen now runs Omi's Pantry, a restaurant on Winnipeg's Pembina Highway, and though she doesn't own any of McKennitt's albums, says, "I just know her voice. She has developed but she's kept her positive purity all the way. If she came into the restaurant, I'd say, 'Sing for me.'")

Irene McKennitt raised her children, ferrying Loreena about, keeping up her nursing, juggling shifts. Jack McKennitt hardly ever stopped working, his livestock business regularly taking him from Morden to district farms, to the Winnipeg stockyards and back. He also ran an auction barn just west of Morden in Pilot Mound. In his daughter's recollection, "My father built his business up from scratch, and he worked very, very hard. He would be up at five-thirty, six in the morning, and he'd be gone until ten. To survive as a self-employed person you have to do those kind of hours, and there is a cost. My father always felt badly that we didn't spend more time fishing or whatever...but I understood.

"Often we'd just talk. They could be very ethical kinds of conversations. My father would talk about 'the little guy', explain that you gave him just as much attention as the big guy. Not for better business, but because it was a good thing to do."

Loreena's childhood was a cross between the tomboy pursuits of sports and the ether of music. But adolescence became pretty much a cross to bear, and her mother leaves it to Loreena's discretion to describe the difficulties, which began in grade seven. "I was playing sports and I was playing music in my own kind of creative and willful way. But I was different, you know? I wasn't kind of a real social creature like a lot of other girls my age. And because I felt older and different from many of my school chums, I spent time with my phys-ed teachers."

Her grade seven phys-ed teacher enjoyed nature and Loreena's company, and the two spent a lot of time together after school. "But there developed the sense that this was unusual, there were lesbian kind of overtones to the whole friendship when in fact there was not a hint of any of that." Still, the teacher was dismissed over Loreena. The next year, her phys-ed teacher was male. "Similar kind of thing. These just happened to be the people who were more mature, had been to different places. This man liked to talk about philosophy, he played pieces on the piano, we'd just hang out after school and talk, just on the edge of the gymnasium. There was great concern that this too was 'unnatural', and he too was dismissed."

It's clear that the red-haired teenager felt the classic negative affection that small minds hold for exceptional children in their midst. Margaret Laurence had known it, growing up in a small town not far away. And across the country in his home town, another kid just into his teens was beginning to. When hockey prodigy Wayne Gretzky scored, the other kids' parents booed. For Loreena McKennitt too, the catcalls kept coming.

The last straw came in grade eleven. An honour student, she was often absent from class, playing music or sports; her name was also in the papers as a music-festival winner. Some parents demanded a crack- down on delinquent kids, and she was lumped in. Tired of the chorus of "Who does she thing she is?" Irene and Jack McKennitt enrolled their daughter at Winnipeg's Balmoral Hall, School for Girls. "We never told anybody at the old school," says Loreena. "I just never showed up for grade twelve." (As Gretzky later wrote, "I had to get out of Brantford.")

Fortune decreed that in 1975, while the rest of the world was going disco, Winnipeg was in the middle of a folk-music revival, fuelled by the birth of the Winnipeg Folk Festival the year before. Loreena McKennitt wandered right into it. She had wanted to become a veterinarian, but when she began to be paid for singing, agriculture at the University of Manitoba didn't stand a chance.

Still a teenager, she worked days in her dad's Winnipeg office, leaving the stockyards each night for a nightspot called the Hollow Mug, where as part of a cast of five she warbled and hoofed her way through abridged Broadway shows on a small circular stage. Her heart, however, belonged to an informal folk club she had joined that met above a woodworking shop on Main Street. It was there she was introduced to Celtic music, through the recordings of bands such as Planxty, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, and the Bothy Band; it was there she was touched for the first time by the ethereal sound of the Celtic harp by way of Breton harpist Alan Stivell's classic album, Renaissance de la harpe celtique. She told an interviewer, "It enthralled me so, I put it on a reel-to-reel tape so I could go to bed listening to it and wouldn't have to get up to turn the record over."

But by the late seventies the folk boom in Winnipeg was slowing, and a couple of favourite clubs had folded. A relationship with an actor brought her to Stratford, and in 1981 she settled there for good. She was, by now, an accomplished singer and musician, she could act, she composed music, and she was welcomed into the scene around the Festival. But she was still a "singer looking for a song" when, in 1982, she decided to go to Ireland.

Why Ireland? The McKennitts had come to Canada from County Donegal in the 1830s; her mother's family, the Dickeys, were from Belfast. The family had even kept great-grandfather's shillelagh. Still, "the old sod" can be as petty and humdrum as any other place. But McKennitt was looking for "romantic Ireland", as Yeats had called it. She found a great guide to that romance by following a bit of advice from Winnipeg folk singer Jim Donahue:" You should find John Moriarity if you can."

Moriarity was a west-country Irishman who had come to Winnipeg in the mid-sixties to teach English at the University of Manitoba, the first male lecturer on campus to sport shoulder-length hair. He had a passion for poetry and a gift for performance to the point of transport - his eyes squeezed shut, his long martyr's face turned skyward, his elegant Irish tones reaching for the glories of Hopkins and Yeats. It was said that listening to Moriarity read "The Wild Swans at Coole" could change your life. But he'd streaked across the Winnipeg arts scene like a comet, and then disappeared. McKennitt had a phone number for his brother in Dublin.

"Oh, John," said the brother. "He's not a professor any more, he's a gardener at one of the Guinness estates in County Kildare. I'm going out there this afternoon. You can come with me."

McKennitt still relishes the telling. "It's beautiful country, horse country. We arrive at John's abode and he comes in in this mad rush of hair. We had tea in the living room. We sat and we started to talk." The talk went on for weeks.

"John's own mother was very poorly, dying I believe. He went up to Kerry to see her, then came back. And he was madly in love with this woman, Eileen, from the west coast. The relationship had just broken up. He was just in a state of very serious grief. We'd sit up well into the middle of the night, talking about relationships and life and the whole thing. And then we would toodle upstairs to bed. I was on this mattress in the living room next to an enormous monastery table piled this high with books. There was a piano there and sometimes I would get up and play it, and I would hear him upstairs, sobbing his heart out. It was very intense."

From the heightened reality of Moriarity's world, she traveled on to the west coast of Ireland. She found Doolin, the seat of Irish traditional music, and the strange and dramatic landscapes of County Clare - the eerie moonscape they call The Burren ("not a tree whereon to hang a man") and the 700-foot Cliffs of Moher. "Even in that spectacular place," writes Jan Morris, "a hint of sadness loiters. Menancholy is endemic to Ireland." And melancholy became the quality that would tinge McKennitt's voice in her finest performances. It may have taken her two more years, and a trip to England, to find her Celtic harp and teach herself to play it, but the trip to Ireland was her turning point. Born Irish at the age of twenty-four.

She'd found what drew her as an artist, but what was she to make of it and could she make a living out of it? The first part of the question was answered when she worked out the music for Yeat's "The Stolen Child" on her harp and, in 1985, recorded it and eight other pieces on a self-produced cassette she called Elemental.

The second part was harder. She believed she had created a beautiful folk album, but the prospect of promoting and selling it was daunting. Ten years out of high school, far from her roots, just out of a relationship with actor and singer Cedric Smith (a collaborator on much of the album): for the first time real doubt set in. She is not the first broke, exhausted, one-album artist who has drifted into inertia and then depression.

"It lasted about three months," she remembers. "I didn't have any money, I didn't want to eat. I couldn't sleep. Tuesdays, just to force myself out of the house, I'd go down and quilt with the ladies at the Red Cross...The depression was a very dark place. It scared the hell out of me." She rescued herself by turning outward - to a cause, the Stratford Heritage Trust. The council meetings and letter writing that came with a campaign to save historic buildings began to revive her. They lost a historic knitting mill; they preserved a stone schoolhouse. When she turned to her music again, it was with a similar determined, down-to-earth activism. She went right to the people. Loreena McKennitt became a busker, most often at the St Lawrence Market in Toronto.

"I would drive in on Saturday mornings, early, early, early in my little Civic just to get the good spot there. In the old building, in the front foyer, there's a real resonance." Red hair flowing and vocals soaring, she cut a dramatic figure, for some. "I remember a tiny woman named Celeste from Winnipeg emerging from the crowd after I'd finished this piece, and I was really enjoying what I was doing. But tears were streaming down her face, and she said, 'Oh, Loreena, has it come to this!'"

Actually, McKennitt was doing something most musicians only dream about: taking home everything she earned. And catching a trend: the "independent" movement in music was just dawning as technology democratized cassette production and the music industry became more and more fragmented. Leaning heavily on Diane Sward Rapaport's practical guide 'How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording', McKennitt began to turn herself into a small business. "Who are your fans?" the book asked. Everywhere she busked she tried to find out; selling Elemental, she built up a mailing list, and then she courted the stores.

In the late eighties she released two more albums, 'To Drive the Cold Winter Away' and 'Parallel Dreams'. The first was a spare collection of rare winter songs recorded in some remarkable settings, such as the Benedictine Glenstal Abbey near Limerick. The second brought a musical group into the process (including the Edmonton guitarist Brian Hughes) and charged her Celtic sound with a new spirit of adventure - as in her triumphant "Huron 'Beltane' Fire Dance," a fusion of Celtic rhythms and native chanting. Critical reception of these albums was warm to hot, and the music was selling. She decided it was time for the picture to grow.

McKennitt sat down to talk with Warner Music holding just the right kinds of cards. Her lawyer, Graham Henderson (whose other clients include Cowboy Junkies, Crash Test Dummies, and Holly Cole), explains: "A lot of acts go into a record company for their 'deal' and the label basically says 'Here it is, take it or leave it.' We scrap and fight, but there's not a lot of bargaining power. People want access to the marketplace and the record companies provide it. Loreena, on the other hand, had developed her own access. She was selling thirty thousand records. She could sell out the Winter Garden for two shows. Her question was, 'What can you do for me?' I have to say she walked out of Warner with an exceptional contract.

McKennitt kept her right to sell her albums at concerts or by mail order, and negotiated a healthy percentage of the sales that would be generated by Warner's vast distribution in Canada, the U.S., and abroad. For five years, which had begun to feel like forever, she'd been managing her own career - hauling around her receipt books and ledgers, calling record stores, scheduling her tours, hiring musicians, "driving to gigs still sticking the inserts into the cassette boxes." She says it had got to the point where "eighty per cent of my time was spent administering. The workload was unbelievable. The stage was like a sanctuary. As long as I was playing, I knew there wasn't going to be a phone call." With the Warner deal she was finally able to hire an assistant and share the load.

The first album she made under the Warner label was The Visit. Her ideas for its sound began with Celtic folk and grew with her dawning awareness that the Celts had originally migrated from eastern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Sitar, balalaika, cello, drums, the violin of Hugh Marsh, her own vocals, harp and keyboards - she wanted to find musical elements that reflected that history of migration, and she slaved to get it right. A wailing Celtic anthem, "All Souls Night," opened the album. She sang a weary, slightly debauched version of "Greensleeves." She created a hypnotic, eleven-minute adaptation of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (her "hit single," she joked). By the end, she had "totally lost perspective. I thought every song was dreadful. I told Warner's, 'Please don't feel that you have to put it out.'"

But The Visit, released in November, 1991, began selling briskly and didn't stop. McKennitt went on the road to support it, though she was already paying the price of earlier tours (the lugging of a forty-five pound harp, computer, briefcase, and bags through auditoriums, airport terminals, motels). "I went out with a herniated disc in my back. I couldn't dress myself, couldn't put on my shoes. For the first few days my mother came with us to help me. I couldn't lie down, so I'd be sitting up all night in a chair and I'd see my mother's head kind of peeking out from the bunk on this rock-and-roll bus. It was a panic". But not always. "I remember doing the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary, and sitting at the piano and when I had to put my foot on the sustain pedal the pain would just send me through the roof." (Where did the remarkable determination come from? Her mother was sure she knew: "She has her father's drive. She is so like him in so many ways.")

The reviews glowed like the "bonfires...on the rolling hillsides" she sang about in "All Souls Night". 1992 became a remarkable run. The Globe and Mail said she was "fast becoming a National Treasure". Le Soleil swooned, too: [French deleted - keyboard can't accents.] Then there was Europe. Britain's Q magazine listed The Visit among the best albums of the year: "a remarkable collection of original and traditional songs...a melodic feast full of surprises, with one of the most commanding vocal performances of recent years." L'arpista canadenca" went gold in Spain, and took Italy, Norway, and the rest of Europe in her stride. She was compared favorably with England's Kate Bush and Ireland's Enya.

But the year was brought down to earth by Jack McKennitt's illness, and his daughter's efforts to get home to Morden to see him as often as she could. After struggling through six courses of chemotherapy, Jack McKennitt died of cancer at sixty-two.

From time to time in concert, McKennitt will close with another song from The Visit, a quiet, lyrical meditation from Shakespeare's Cymbeline. It begins:

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

Asked if she sings it for her father, she whispers, "I have".

The town of Morden sent Loreena McKennitt an immense congratulatory telegram after she won her Juno for Best Roots or Traditional Album of 1992. And her mother and friends and a good portion of her home town cheered at her concert at the Morden Recreation Centre on her last national tour. "That other time has passed," she says.

But the roots she seeks are still her chosen ones, her project the exploration of Celtic music and its origins. "I want people to listen to my music," she says, "and ask 'Who were the Celts?'"

Her new album, due this spring, is called "The Mask and Mirror". "This recording I'm going to shine this flashlight I've got on Spain, I'm going to shine it on Morocco, I'm going to shine it on the Gnostic Gospels...on the Knights Templar. We're going to talk about astronomy and mathematics..."

Any collaboration with a romantic poet?

"Yes," she replies, "St John of the Cross." And then she laughs at how worthy it all sounds.

At breakfast in the solemn luxury of the Royal York Hotel after a night in the recording studio spent chasing after meaning and magic, she is the picture of prosperity and poise. Beautifully dressed in understated black and white, an antique silver timepiece swinging on a slim chain around her neck, she contemplates a plate of fruit and yogurt. Then just has to laugh again at the labour that builds the romance.

And how was last night's session?

"A misery," she replies. "It was a friggin' misery."