| Loreena McKennitt | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt |
| Born | 17 February 1957 Morden, Manitoba, Canada |
| Origin | Stratford, Ontario, Canada |
| Genres | Celtic, world, New Age |
| Occupations | Musician, songwriter, producer |
| Instruments | Voice, piano, harp, accordion |
| Years active | 1985–present |
| Labels | Quinlan Road, Warner Bros., Verve Forecast/Universal |
| Website | quinlanroad.com |
Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt, CM, OM, (born February 17, 1957) is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist and pianist who writes, records and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. McKennitt is known for her refined, clear soprano vocals.[1] She has sold more than 14 million records worldwide.[2]
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McKennitt was born in Morden, Manitoba of Irish and Scottish descent to parents Jack (died 1992; a livestock dealer) and Irene McKennitt (1931-2011; a nurse). She moved to Stratford, Ontario in 1981, where she still resides.
When Loreena was young she wanted to become a veterinarian but she found that music chose her rather than she it.[3] Developing a passion for Celtic music, she learned to play the Celtic harp and began busking at various places, including St. Lawrence Market in Toronto in order to earn money to record her first album.[4]
McKennitt's first album, Elemental, was released in 1985, followed by To Drive the Cold Winter Away (1987), Parallel Dreams (1989), The Visit (1991), The Mask and Mirror (1994), A Winter Garden (1995), The Book of Secrets (1997), An Ancient Muse (2006), A Midwinter Night’s Dream (2008), and The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2010). All of her work is released under her own label, Quinlan Road.
In 1990, McKennitt provided the music for the National Film Board of Canada documentary, "The Burning Times" a feminist revisionist account of the Early Modern European witchcraft trials. The main theme would later be rerecorded by her and her band and called "Tango for Evora," a track which appears on her album, The Visit.
In 1993, she toured Europe supporting Mike Oldfield. In 1995, her version of the traditional Irish song "Bonny Portmore" was featured in the Highlander series. McKennitt's single "The Mummers' Dance" received airplay in North American markets during the spring of 1997, and was used as the theme song for the short-lived TV series, Legacy. It also saw use in the trailer for a wide-release 1998 Drew Barrymore film, Ever After.[5]
Her music appeared in the movies The Santa Clause, Soldier, Jade, Holy Man, The Mists of Avalon and Tinkerbell; and in the television series Roar, Due South, and Full Circle (Women and Spirituality).
In 1998, McKennitt's fiancé Ronald Rees, his brother Richard and their close friend Gregory Cook drowned during a boating accident on Georgian Bay. She was deeply affected by the event and subsequently founded the Cook-Rees Memorial Fund for Water Search and Safety in the same year.
At the time of the incident, she was working on a live album of two performances called Live in Paris and Toronto. The proceeds from this album were donated to the newly created memorial fund, totaling some three million dollars.[6] After the release of the live album, McKennitt decided to substantially reduce the number of her public performances and did not release any new recordings until the studio album An Ancient Muse in 2006.
McKennitt's music has generally been classified as World / Celtic music even though it contains aspects and characteristics of music from around the globe and is sometimes classified as Folk music in record stores.
Before McKennitt composes any music, she engages in considerable research on a specific subject which then forms the general concept of the album. Before creating Elemental and Parallel Dreams, she traveled to Ireland for inspiration from the country's history, folklore, geography and culture. The album The Mask and Mirror was preceded by research in Spain where she engaged in studying Galicia, a Celtic section of Spain, along with its abundant Arabic roots. The result was an album that included elements of Celtic and Arabic music. According to the jacket notes, her album An Ancient Muse was inspired by travels among and reading about the various cultures along the Silk Road.
McKennitt is compared to Enya, but McKennitt's music is more grounded in traditional and classical invocations, using literary works as sources of lyrics and springboards for interpretation such as "The Lady of Shalott" by Lord Tennyson, "Prospero's Speech" (the final soliloquy in William Shakespeare's The Tempest), "Snow" by Archibald Lampman, "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, Dante's Prayer, William Blake's "Lullaby", Yeats' "The Stolen Child", "It was an English Ladye Bright" by Sir Walter Scott and "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes.
In 2005, McKennitt was involved in an acrimonious court case in Britain when her former friend and employee, Niema Ash, published a book that contained intimate details of their friendship. McKennitt argued that much of the book contained confidential personal information that Ash had no right to publish. The British courts found that there had indeed been a breach of confidence and a misuse of McKennitt's private information, and the case is likely to set important precedents in British law on the privacy of celebrities.[7] The House of Lords affirmed the lower court's decisions in 2007.
In September 2006, McKennitt performed live at the Alhambra. The performance premiered on PBS and in August 2007 was released on a three-disc DVD/CD set titled Nights from the Alhambra.
In 2008, McKennitt wrote and composed a song she titled "To The Fairies They Draw Near" as the theme song for Disney's direct-to-video animated film Tinker Bell. She also provided the narration for the film.[8]
In early 2008, she returned to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios to record A Midwinter Night’s Dream, an extended version of her 1995 mini-album A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season. The album was released on October 28, 2008.[9]
Since the release of An Ancient Muse, Loreena has toured consistently, with a European and North American tour in the spring of 2007, an extensive cross Canada and United States tour in the fall of 2007, a summer tour of Europe in 2008 and a Mediterranean tour in the summer of 2009 with stops in Greece,[10] Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Hungary and Italy.
On September 17, 2009, McKennitt announced that she planned to release a two-disc album titled "A Mediterranean Odyssey" in the fall of 2009. The first CD, "From Istanbul to Athens," consisted of ten new live recordings made during McKennitt’s 2009 Mediterranean Tour, including songs she had never before recorded in concert. The second CD, "The Olive and the Cedar," had a Mediterranean theme which McKennitt herself curated. It contained previously released studio recordings created between the years of 1994 and 2006.
November 16, 2010 saw the US release (November 12 for Europe) of McKennitt's latest studio album, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Recorded at the Sharon Temple, Ontario, it consists of nine traditional Celtic songs. "Every once and again there is a pull to return to one's own roots or beginnings, with the perspective of time and experience, to feel the familiar things you once loved and love still," says Loreena.
Late in the 1990s, McKennitt created No Journey's End, a half-hour documentary, for American television. In it, she discussed the influences behind her music. No Journey's End contained excerpts from several songs from the albums Parallel Dreams, The Visit, and The Mask and Mirror. It also shows live performances of the songs "The Lady of Shalott," "Santiago," and "The Dark Night of the Soul." It was later released on DVD and VHS, the former also containing music videos for "The Mummers' Dance" and "The Bonny Swans." A bonus copy of the DVD was included with the 2004 remastered versions of McKennitt's CDs.
In 2008, Loreena released A Moveable Musical Feast, based on her 2007 An Ancient Muse tour. The DVD included interviews with Loreena, her band, crew, fans and professional colleagues from the Canadian music industry.
| Year | Album details | Peak chart positions | Certifications (sales threshold) |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAN [11][12] |
GER [13] |
US [14] |
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| 1985 | Elemental
|
— | — | — | |||||||
| 1987 | To Drive the Cold Winter Away
|
— | — | — | |||||||
| 1989 | Parallel Dreams
|
— | — | — | |||||||
| 1991 | The Visit
|
28 | — | — | |||||||
| 1994 | The Mask and Mirror
|
4 | 18 | 143 | |||||||
| 1997 | The Book of Secrets
|
3 | 7 | 17 | |||||||
| 2006 | An Ancient Muse
|
9 | 15 | 83 |
|
||||||
| 2008 | A Midwinter Night's Dream
|
12 | 27 | 140 | |||||||
| 2010 | The Wind That Shakes the Barley
|
13 | 28 | 141 | |||||||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | |||||||||||
| Year | Album details | Peak chart positions | Certifications (sales threshold) |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAN [11][12] |
GER [13] |
US [14] |
|||||||||
| 1995 | Live in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts
|
— | — | — | |||||||
| 1999 | Live in Paris and Toronto
|
— | 65 | — | |||||||
| 2007 | Nights from the Alhambra
|
— | 11 | 190 |
|
||||||
| 2009 | A Mediterranean Odyssey
|
11 | — | — | |||||||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | |||||||||||
| Year | Album details | Peak chart positions | Certifications (sales threshold) |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAN [11][12] |
GER [13] |
US [14] |
|||||||||
| 1997 | The Best of Loreena McKennitt
|
- | - | - | - | ||||||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | |||||||||||
| Year | Album details | Peak chart positions | Certifications (sales threshold) |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAN [12] |
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| 1995 | A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season
|
44 |
|
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| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | |||||||||||
| Year | Single | Peak chart positions[20][21] | Album | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAN | US | US AC | US Pop | |||||||||||
| 1991 | "The Lady of Shalott" | — | — | — | — | The Visit | ||||||||
| "All Souls Night" | — | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| "Courtyard Lullaby" | — | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| 1993 | "Greensleeves" | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| 1994 | "The Bonny Swans" | 75 | — | — | — | The Mask and Mirror | ||||||||
| "Santiago" | — | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| "The Dark Night of the Soul" | — | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| 1995 | "The Mystic's Dreams" | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" | — | — | — | — | A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season | |||||||||
| 1997 | "The Mummers' Dance" | 10 | 18 | 23 | 14 | The Book of Secrets | ||||||||
| 1998 | "Marco Polo" | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| 2006 | "Caravanserai" | — | — | — | — | An Ancient Muse | ||||||||
| 2007 | "Penelope's Song" | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| 2008 | "The Seven Rejoices of Mary" | — | — | — | — | non-album single | ||||||||
| "Noël Nouvelet!" | — | — | — | — | A Midwinter's Night Dream | |||||||||
| 2009 | "Dante's Prayer" | — | — | — | — | non-album single | ||||||||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart "*" indicates unknown chart positions. |
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