This week, WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt spoke with Canadian singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Loreena McKennitt. McKennitt performs on Thursday, November 2, at the Taft Theater in Cincinnati as part of her Visit Revisited Anniversary Tour, which commemorates her 1991 album, The Visit. A blend of folk and new-age influences, The Visit won Best Roots and Traditional Album at the 1992 JUNO awards, and remains among the singer’s best-known albums. In the interview, McKennitt spoke with Juliet about returning to touring after a hiatus, and recounted stories of recording The Visit. She also discussed the environmental themes of some traditional Irish folk songs, and reflected on the connection between her music and her civic life.
In 2018, Loreena McKennitt felt that she needed to take a break from music. “I just felt that I needed time out to reassess whether or not I should continue on with my career,” she said, “There are other priorities and issues in the world.” McKennit said she worried about environmental destruction and the erosion of democracy around the world. Yet, when she left her Ontario farm this year and began playing for live audiences again, she knew it was the right decision. She compared the feeling of sharing music to the feeling of sharing a meal:
“It’s quite gratifying... I feel that preparing the music is a bit like preparing a meal for friends—it’s not complete until you’ve actually invited the friends over for dinner, and hopefully they like some of what you have to offer.”
McKennitt’s November 2 performance in Cincinnati is part of the North American leg of The Visit Revisited tour, which will continue to the United Kingdom and Europe in Spring 2024. This year marks the 22nd anniversary of her fourth album, The Visit, which she released on her own Stratford, Ontario-based Quinlan Road record label in 1991. The album features original songs as well as traditional songs of the British Isles, like “Greensleeves” and “Bonny Portmore.” McKennit told Juliet that she initially never planned for “Greensleeves” to be part of The Visit. In fact, the song was recorded several years earlier, during a session for her 1989 album, Parallel Dreams. She told the story of the recording:
“That track has such a funny history. It was never a song I intended to record. I was working on an artist development project in 1988 with PolyGram. We were recording four other pieces, and the engineer had to take a phone call. There were about three or four of us on the studio floor, and just to bide time, I said to them, ‘I wonder how Tom Waits would do “Greensleeves”.’ So we started messing around. The engineer was keeping half an ear out for what we were doing, and when he got off the phone, he said, ‘Why don’t we just take a version of that?’”
McKennit said that the spontaneous “Greensleeves” recording exemplifies the ephemerality of creative inspiration. She told Juliet, “There are times where there is a kind of channeling or a visitation aspect to it, that you can prepare yourself for the circumstances that you might be creative—but you actually can’t go and force yourself to do things after a certain point. You have to let the moment fuel your inspiration.”
While McKennit stressed the unpredictability of musical inspiration, she also emphasized the social value of folk music traditions, some of which can be traced centuries into the past. She told Juliet that while modern communications technology allows for instantaneous flows of media and information, it also has contributed to the decline of music-making as social activity.
“Long before radio, television, and the internet, poetry and folk music were means by which people could tell their histories and their stories. It really stitched them together. I think in contemporary times, we’ve swung way to the other side of the spectrum…. There can be a dilution and a fracturing of those traditions, and what is most concerning to me is breaking down those cultural expressions of spending time together— doing something together, like singing together, playing music together, just for the love of it.”
Often, McKennit added, folk songs can be surprisingly relevant to contemporary social and political issues. She gave the example of “Bonny Portmore,” a traditional Irish folk song that tells the story of a great oak tree that was used for shipbuilding after it fell in 1760. She said that the song resonates in our age of global warming and globalization.
“People were lamenting the cutting down of this one tree, but I think there was a greater reflection on the decimation of the forest that took place all over Europe, including Ireland, for ship building—this is the empire building of England… That’s still such a contemporary concern.”
Loreena McKennit’s latest release is Under a Winter’s Moon (Live at Knox Church, Stratford, Ontario / 2021), which came out in 2022. She told Juliet that her next album, The Road Back Home, is slated for release in spring 2024. The album is a collection of traditional Celtic music, recorded with Celtic band The Bookends. For more information about McKennit’s release schedule and tour dates, visit her website, loreenamckennitt.com.
Text by Peter Day, adapted from an interview by Juliet Fromholt.
