Samarkand Of Wonderful

By John Diliberto, from Tower Pulse magazine
Issue Number 165, November 1997

Harpist/composer Loreena McKennitt rides the Trans-Siberian Express and puts it to beautiful music


In the Ontario town of Stratford, thunder roars in the sky, rain pours down and lightning washes the village streets in its glare. In the belfry of a 100-year-old Presbyterian church, Loreena McKennitt opens windows to let out the humid heat of the day. As she sits among harps, computers, recording consoles and instruments from around the world, a bat flits through the hallway.

"That's the bat in the belfry," McKennitt says, laughing. "I actually haven't seen it for a few years but it was up here when I was working on The Visit. I remember it distinctly: The thunder and the rain, the bat in the belfry. It puts it all in perspective, thank God."

McKennitt laughs joyously, but there's an edge of tired relief to her tone as she decompresses from the production of her latest album, The Book of Secrets (Warner Bros.). She idly picks up a tape from the clutter. "The Visit's rough tracks," McKennitt observes, holding the seeds of the breakthrough album that brought her to the world in 1992. She looks at it as if it was a lost letter from a forgotten lover. "It's like time stood still. I mean, that's how crazy it's all been."

Her career has been a nonstop whirl since her first self-produced album, Elemental in 1985. Armed with Diane Sward Rapaport's book How to Make and Sell Your Own Record, she borrowed $10,000 from her family and ran off 50 copies.

"I thought, 'OK, now what?'" she recalls.

McKennitt hit the road. She began busking in St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, sold out her first pressing-and the rest is gold-album history. Well, not quite. McKennitt's life, as her music, has been one of change and evolution. Growing up in Canada, she was classically trained in voice and piano but planned a career as a veterinarian. Instead she began singing and acting. She did the Bard in Canada's Shakespearean Festival, then discovered the Celtic harp. "I heard a recording called The Renaissance of the Celtic Harp by Alan Stivell," she says. "And when I heard that recording, I was very much smitten by the sound that was created by the harp. This would have been about 1978 or so."

The harp became central to McKennitt's sound on a few more self-produced albums, but by the time of The Visit in 1992, she was already on another path. Through the harp and her interest in Celtic music, she began exploring connections with Eastern and Indian music and culture. That in turn, brought her to Morocco on her next album, The Mask and Mirror. And now, McKennitt has gone even further afield. The Book of Secrets started with research in Italy and wound up with McKennitt riding the Trans-Siberian Express.

The evidence of McKennitt's travels can be seen in the instruments that are cast about her belfry studio, many piled in one corner.

"That's the oud that I brought back from Morocco, but clearly it was built for a different climate than this, as it's kind of fallen into itself," she laments at the warped face of the instrument. "There are quite a range of instruments, from mandolin and fiddle [to] a drum I commissioned out of an instrument maker in Rome, a lovely frame drum. This sitar here is from a shop in London. This is a kanon that I bought in Istanbul that I play on the 'Prologue' track."

Only a few months ago, these instruments-or ones just like them-were providing the life force behind songs like "Marco Polo." Recording in RealWorld Studios near Bath, England, McKennitt drew from the international caravan that passes through Peter Gabriel's global-music commune. On "Marco Polo" and other tracks, hand drums throb Middle Eastern grooves and hurdy-gurdys assail the melodies.

"I was imagining the kind of cultural influences that somebody like Marco Polo would have encountered in traveling in the 1300s or 1400s," McKennitt reflects. "He probably would have encountered some Sufi groups, and in terms of that, I wanted to weave in some thread of authenticity. And so the melody that is at the very beginning of 'Marco Polo,' and which I'm singing in the middle, is an authentic Sufi melody."

Historical figures like Marco Polo, and writers like W.B. Yeats and-on the new album, Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman-have all provided material for McKennitt, making her sometimes seem like a woman who'd prefer to live in another time. Although she adapts the writings of Shakespeare, Tennyson and St. John on the Cross to her music, McKennitt says she has no desire to live in the past.

"The trap that one can get into is romanticizing other periods of time and saying, 'God, wouldn't it have been wonderful to have lived 500 years ago or 200 years ago?'" she reflects. "But life was pretty hard then."

But she does see the past as a prism through which to view the present. "What Dante was writing about in the 14th century about the human condition, I can see certainly applies to the Russians in 1995 or the West," she observes. "The material that I'm attracted to are universal themes that are not really restricted to a particular place or time. One of the strengths of Shakespeare's work is that he understood the human condition so well and in such a sophisticated way that his work has tremendous resonance even in our times."

McKennitt is on a pilgrimage, only she's not sure where or even, really, why. Her latest direction has included an exploration of Sufism, the mystical offshoot of Islam.

"Curiosity is probably a very casual word for the force that causes you to understand and to know certain things," she confesses. "I feel that it's like asking a person why are they interested to learn riding a bicycle. Or I don't think you totally understand why, but there is a force like gravity that is pulling you toward it."

Loreena McKennitt is too self-aware to go off on mystical rambles, and one suspects that even if she attained nirvana, she wouldn't be writing personal confessionals, epic epiphanies or even love songs. That would be too personal for the flaxen-haired singer. "I felt that as a performer, as a writer, that writing about my life is not so important," she insists. "I don't feel I am that important. There are a lot of other subjects and particularly corners of history that are far more interesting."

Instead, like the poets and writers she admires, she reveals her journey with stories. On "Skellig," she paints a picture of an Irish monk creating illuminated manuscripts on the rough-hewn Irish island of the same name. She uses it to explore the psychology of isolation, the passion of a commitment to God. "I scribe the words of God to the march of history," she sings in her rich, full-throated soprano voice. "The waves would wash my tears, the wind my memories."

The island of Skellig is one of the few places McKennitt hasn't actually visited, but she's traveled the world, gathering material from Ireland to Italy, Morocco to Siberia. "I find if one can actually travel to a place and smell it and hear it and feel that whole sensual aspect of it, that it gives me much, much more inspirational material to work with," she enthuses. "My challenge then becomes, how do I repaint all of these smells and colors and sounds through the texture of the instruments or the lyrics?"

McKennitt's The Book of Secrets is a travelogue that follows her sojourns to the Far East, riding the Trans-Siberian Express while deciphering Dante's The Divine Comedy. It's not the light reading of the vacation traveler. "There seemed to be a very strong resonance of the human condition that Dante was describing in these books to what I was witnessing outside of this window of the train," she reflects. "A country which had strength in its own dignity and pride, but now which is barely, barely hanging on."

These feelings emerge in the dark rhythms of "Night Ride Across the Caucasus" and in the somber tones of "Dante's Prayer," which opens and closes with a haunting, almost submerged choral work by the St. Petersburg Choir.

Even as her new album is prepared for release, Loreena McKennitt has decided that for the first time, she will not tour immediately in support of it, and she's limiting her press coverage to a handful of interviews. She's run her own record label, Quinlan Road, from the beginning, and she recognizes the path that has turned people like Windham Hill and Imaginary Road founder Will Ackerman from musicians into corporate executives.

"I personally have been so consumed by my own career, as it were," she says with quiet exasperation. "I have an office in London, England; five people work for me there. An office in Stratford, Ontario; five people work for me there. And sometimes there are inner voices that tell you that you need a change. For me, the most significant gift I can give myself is to release myself from a lot of the responsibilities that I've created for a while and see what happens."

What she hopes will happen is more music. "Absolutely so," she asserts. "I have a sneaking suspicion that it'll be similar to the unfettered, psychological environment I enjoyed 10 years ago."

She even says she might start busking again. "Oh yes, I would, yeah."