 f one begins
with the big questions of 'Who am I?' and 'Why am I here?', the understanding of the roads
back in history seem as important as the ones forward, whether or not it pertains to the
individual or collective, to the subject of love or the control of information."
In The Book Of Secrets, Loreena McKennitt's seventh release and successor to the U.S.
gold records The Visit and The Mask And Mirror, the Canadian artist continues a process of
cultural excavation of the pan-Celtic heritage, serving as a creative springboard and a
passport to eras past.
Breathing life into long-forgotten lyrics, McKennitt first made her name as a folk
singer, singing traditional folk ballads like "She Moved Through The Fair" with
freshness and immediacy. Over the course of her three most recent albums, however, she has
expanded both her music and choice of narrative subjects.
The Book Of Secrets was conceived over several journeys, including one taken via the
legendary Trans Siberian Express, in which the self-managed singer and record company head
found the quiet she needed to reflect and prepare for The Book Of Secrets. Finally, she
had the time to read Dante's The Divine Comedy, echoes of which appear in the album's
closing track, "Dante's Prayer."
Something of the motion of that epic solo voyage is imprinted on the restless folk who
populate the songs on The Book Of Secrets, many driven by movement and change: the
"thundering hooves" of "Night Ride Across The Caucasus"; the soul
mates of "Dante's Prayer" who "share this humble path," the dramatic
cast of McKennitt's setting of the Alfred Noyes poem "The Highwayman."
Even the isolated monk of "Skellig" only finds peace in his hermitage after
"many a year perched out upon the sea." "The setting of the Skellig Islands
is unbelievably harsh. . . set out in the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland. Even now
to take a boat over there is a risky thing," comments McKennitt. Pursuing a deeper
understanding of the connection between Irish monks and classical European culture, she
visited Bobbio, the mountainous location of the first Irish monastery in Italy.
"It addressed in part how far certain individuals isolate themselves, in an
extreme sense, to heighten their connection to that essence called God," says
McKennitt of her visit to the site.
A long line of tangents form an associative construct for McKennitt's song narratives.
"The Mummers' Song" links the work of a marionette maker she met in Palermo,
Sicily with the "hobby horse" of May Day celebrations in Padstow, Cornwall and a
Sufi order in Turkey.
Yet, as with all fine art, McKennitt's technique is translucent. Ultimately, the months
of research underpinning each track are subliminal; the experience of the music is simply
sensual.
The central melody of "Marco Polo," the instrumental track inspired by the
legendary 13th century explorer of Asia, is a traditional Sufi chant which Polo himself
might have heard.
"As with the last three recordings, this one is also a document of my own path of
exploration through the vehicle of music and history. There are a lot of mechanisms within
our contemporary society that seem to dilute and diminish our sense of identity. As a
result, I think there is a heightened need to understand who you are, what your roots are,
and where they are connected."
In some measure, The Book Of Secrets is an attempt to address these searching
philosophical questions that incessantly intrigue McKennitt's lively intellect. An eager
auto-didact, her conversation is a torrent of cross-cultural allusions. Although she takes
pains to stress her amateur status, she has grown into something of a self-taught
authority in her chosen field: how Celtic and other cultures have exchanged and fused over
centuries to weave the intricate tapestry of our culture today. "I try to figure out
why things are the way they are, and you can't understand that without going back. And in
the course of going back, you discover that, yes, history does repeat itself. There are
cyclical patterns."
Although much of The Book Of Secrets represents the Mediterranean phase of her
explorations, McKennitt was born and raised in Morden, Manitoba, a town of Irish,
Scottish, German, and Icelandic inhabitants in the middle of the Canadian prairies. One
could say it was here she was first exposed to her inter-cultural influences. The most
vigorous Highland dancer in her rural community, she was raised by her mother, a nurse,
and her livestock-trader father.
"It was a very modest community. People came from immigrant stock. Survival was
the order of the day and in some ways broad cultural exposure was limited. Although my
family's ancestors on the most part came from Ireland, there was very little overt
'Celticness' to my upbringing in the sense of music or storytelling." After an
adolescence spent in Morden, McKennitt was eager to move into a wider world. She was first
exposed to the Celtic folk boom in a Winnipeg folk club. "The first step for me was
Celtic music. The whole sound drew me in an almost instinctive way and it became this
vehicle to pursue history in a way I could never have imagined," she recalls.
In more cosmopolitan Winnipeg, she briefly studied to be a veterinarian, before moving
on to finally settle in Stratford, Ontario, where her composing and performing skills were
soon appreciated in the lively scene around the city's internationally renowned
Shakespearean Festival. McKennitt still makes her home there, living in a rural farmhouse.
Already in love with Yeats and the music of Breton harpist Alain Stivell, Planxty and
the Bothy Band, McKennitt could sense the lyricism of Irish folk music. When she made her
first journey to Ireland in 1982 she was to find a similar lyricism in the contours of the
land and the spirit of the people.
Back home, she put her newly stirred Celtic fervor into an interpretation of Yeats's
"The Stolen Child." Inspired by a D.I.Y book called How To Make and Sell Your
Own Recordings, by Diane Sward Rappaport, she set up her own record company, Quinlan Road,
in 1985, and recorded Elemental, a nine-song cassette. She ran off copies and began
selling them from her car while meeting the public on the most immediate level, as a
busker.
As McKennitt's mailing list grew, word of mouth in cafés and bookshops built her a
significant audience. Her growing audience empathized while McKennitt explored the
traditional canon, always seeking the reverberation that would make an ancient voice
harmonize with her own. She's particularly proud of tracking down "Bonny
Portmore," included on The Visit. An obscure ballad mourning the loss of ancient
British stands of oak, once worshipped by pre-Christian tribes, it has a contemporary
relevance to today's fight to save old-growth forests.
McKennitt followed Elemental by cutting a seasonal perennial in the Christmas carols of
To Drive The Cold Winter Away (1987), and made her first steps towards cross-cultural
fertilization in the subsequent Parallel Dreams (1989). It was at this time she was
commissioned to score music for the National Film Board of Canada's acclaimed film series
"Women and Spirituality."
A pivotal moment for McKennitt's evolution occurred in 1991 in Venice, Italy, at the
largest ever exhibition and collection of international Celtic artifacts. "Until I
went to that exhibition, I thought that Celts were people who came from Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, and Brittany," recalls McKennitt.
Seeing the unimagined riches and variety in the centuries of Celtic art gathered from as
far afield as Hungary, Ukraine, Spain and Asia Minor, she recalls, "I felt
exhilarated. It was like thinking that all there is to your family are your parents,
brothers and sisters, and then you realize there's a whole stretch of history that is an
extension of who you are."
That epiphany transformed McKennitt's music.
The primeval sounding tamboura drone that introduced her next album, The Visit (1992),
announced a new direction with its bold, cinematic interpretations of Shakespeare and
Tennyson, and an unusually edgy take on the Henry VIII-penned ballad,
"Greensleeves."
This process reached a dramatic flowering on 1994's The Mask And Mirror. McKennitt's
new staging post on the voyage was in Galicia, the Celtic corner of Spain, and then on
into 15th-century Spain itself when the cultures of Judaism, Islam and Christianity merged
to produce what is still remembered as the Golden Age, a time of profound cultural
influence on the evolution of Western civilization.
The distinctiveness of McKennitt's musical vision is matched by the independence with
which she has approached the music business. "I think coming from a farming and rural
background gave me the insight into being self-sufficient. You become familiar with
creative problem solving. If you want something badly enough, you will roll up your
sleeves and start chipping away."
When McKennitt decided the time was ripe to move toward the industry establishment, she
signed a unique deal with the Warner Group for the world. It is a deal which has been very
fruitful indeed as her recordings have gone on to sell in the millions in over 40
countries. Beginning with The Visit, Warner has distributed her work, while she controls
every aspect of creation and promotion.
With her one-artist label Quinlan Road expanding into its second office in London, much
of her time is now spent commuting between there and the Stratford base, attending to the
myriad of things which come with running an international career in the music business. At
the exhilarating commencement of a new phase in the cycle of research, recording and
touring, McKennitt surveys the arc of a career that has delved into the past to reflect
the future.
"I feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to marry the vehicle of my talents with
the fuel of my curiosity and imagination. This process has allowed me to explore the
greater depths of our humanity and the human condition in a way that is tangible and full
of meaning. It has taught me that indeed we are a culmination of our collective histories
and that at the end of the day, not only are we and have been more or less the same, but
also there is probably more to bind us together than tear us apart. It is a force of faith
I must believe in."
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Loreena
McKennitt 
