Toronto has a long history of indie music. But, one might be surprised to learn that this history includes acclaimed Grammy Award-nominated musician Loreena McKennitt — one of the original independent musicians in the country. She brings her celtic-infused music and stories of travel to Massey Hall tonight for a rare concert appearance.
McKennitt will be performing as part of a trio, a unique configuration that, she says, allows for her to interact with the crowd a bit more than her usual band format.
“What’s nice about performing in this configuration is that it allows me to take more time to share with the audience a lot of the travels and experiences I’ve had that have kind of shaped the songs and music,” she says.
And, that’s a lot of travel.
Growing up in a small town in Manitoba, McKennitt started taking piano lesson and singing in a choir when she was five years old. But, really, it was just something she did, along with sports and many other things. For the longest time, she wanted to be a veterinarian.
Then, she heard celtic music for the first time.
“When I first heard traditional music from the British Isles I was smitten by it, like, I think, many people are,” she says. “There is something infectious about the modality of it, even more so with Irish music.”
While living in Winnipeg, she joined a folk club that met monthly and trips to Ireland became an annual event. At an art exhibition in Venice, Italy in 1991, she learned of the vastness of the Celts, and how they were more than “a mad collection of anarchists in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany,” but rather extended across Europe and into Asia Minor.
Before long, she was ready to carve out her own unique niche exploring this rich music in her own way, crafting a sound that ventured well beyond traditional Irish music combining elements of the musical traditions of other Celt areas as far afield as Mongolia and India.
“I enjoyed Irish music but I felt that there were other artists who were probably doing it better than I could do it,” she says. “And I was very curious to set my sights on the history of the Celts focussing on writing my own material. I saw it as more of an act of musical travel writing that I was working toward not so-called pieces of art instead of rendering it into a book, it was rendering into recordings.”
In 1985, after a few years with the Stratford Festival that facilitated her move to the southwestern Ontario town she now calls home, she set to work on her own music and went into studio in a barn outside of the town of Guelph and recorded her debut album, Elemental.
“I had 30 cassettes, 15 for immediate friends and family and wondered what I was going to do with the other 15,” says McKennitt. “And I thought there is this noble tradition of busking in the streets of Europe and I’d lived in Toronto a bit off and on, and always shopped down there. So, I would pile my harp into the back of my 1970 Honda Civic, crash on someone’s couch for the night and then very early, 6:30 or 7, get the best spot in the vestibule of the south market building.”
She went on to busk in England and Granville Market in Vancouver, as well.
About then, she became one of the country’s few independent musicians founding the Quinlan Road label through which she would release nine studio albums along live recordings and EPs.
The most successful of which was 1997’s The Book of Secrets that actually peaked at number three on the Canadian album charts — monumental achievement for an artist often placed in the world music category — and it went double-platinum in the United States.
“I have this insatiable curiosity and I love to learn,” she says. “It’s been very gratifying to try and spin some of my experiences into something musical and creative. And it’s an added bonus if other people enjoy it or are enriched by it. Those are the converging things that keep me ticking along.”
