Although Loreena McKennitt titled her most recent album "The Book of Secrets," the Canadian singer reveals surprisingly little of her personal life through her music. Instead, McKennitt has spent much of her 13-year career exploring musty nooks of history and literature, bringing them to life through her unusual fusion of Celtic and Middle Eastern music and her enchanting soprano voice. Her work has culmimated in an album which has not only sat atop the world music chart for the last five months, but has broken the Billboard Top 20. No record has ever done both.
McKennitt owes her success in part to the popularity of "The Mummer's Dance," a single from the album which she allowed to be remixed by DNA's Nick Batt, who retooled Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner." Batt removed just enough of the track's ethnic flavor that it was palatable to radio stations. "There's some ornamentation that involved synthetic swoops and details that I probably wouldn't have put in myself," McKennitt admits. "The public is much more open than perhaps some radio programmers think they are, and the remix actually made the track more psychologically accessible ."
As owner of her own record label, Quinlan Road, McKennitt controls every aspect of her work. "I built my career litterally brick by brick since 1985 from busking on the street," she explains in a lilt that is not quite Irish, not quite Canadian. Born in rural Morden, Manitoba, McKennitt moved to Winnipeg and did her time on the Shakeaspearian stage before taking her harp to the streets. With the help of Diane Sward Rapaport's book "How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording," she published her first record, "Elemental," and founded Quinlan Road Records.
"There are aspects of playing on the street ... that are appealing now ," McKennitt remembers, "insofar as there are fewer responsibilities." She laughs, infectiously. "There was the immediacy of interacting with the public on a very informal and spontaneous basis."
These days, McKennitt's success has become almost too much for the intensely private musician. Once recording for "The Book of Secrets" had finished, she booked herself on a bicycle tour of China which coincided with the album's release date. "I was primarily intending to deliver it and get on with my new life that I've been hankering for for some years now," she explains unapologetically.
But once record sales began to climb, McKennitt realized she had to come back to work. "I just didn't have the heart to see the recording die at the starting gate because it wasn't set up properly." She commissioned the single, and taped a companion video which won the hearts of both MTV and VH1 viewers. At one point she even found herself on MTV News explaining the ritual of mumming, a pagan English folk custom related to tree worship.
McKennitt's music is rife with such references, however; her experiences as a solo traveler and as a lover of literature has informed her music since her first albums, when she set poetry by Tennyson ("The Lady of Shalott") and Yeats ("The Stolen Child") to haunting strains of Celtic harp. Her travels to Ireland, Spain and the Middle East -- and most recently on the Trans-Siberian Express, as captured in "Night Ride Across the Caucasus" -- explore the rich textures of Celtic influence from the time when those people were more prolific throughout Europe than the Romans.
"[My work] resembles more closely that of travel writing," McKennitt explains. "My own personal challenge is to reach deep into these corners and bring forth what has some contemporary relevance to me. And in the process of [doing so], other people can tap into that process . The kinds of themes that are underpinning a lot of this range from: What are our internal needs? What is spirituality? How are we hamstrung by the blunt instruments of the English language to articulate the whole concept of spirituality?"
"We live in some regards in a very ignorant time," McKennitt continues. "We know how to access a lot of data, but what I mean by ignorant is -- You don't hear people talk about wisdom anymore. Wisdom is, I think, only achieved through not only gathering of data and dissecting information. It is a very very sophisticated process of analysis and through the stage of understanding and becoming wise."
McKennitt's professional life, she finds, has not allowed her to make room for that kind of personal wisdom. After she completes a brief tour of Europe and America, which touches down in San Francisco this Thursday for a concert at the Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium, the singer plans to take an extended break from music.
"I've got a lot of restructuring to [do]... even making my house a home," she laughs. "Putting curtains on the windows, and learning to cook to the degree that I'm not poisoning my friends. Or you know -- having friends."
The constant strain of a career in music concerns her. "You can... become a kind of unbalanced person because there's a lot of unnatural states within it all. You can wake up one day and you're 55 or 60 and your career is through and in the meantime you haven't spent any time balancing the rest of your life out."
McKennitt's dedication to her spirit is what makes her so refreshing in a world of predetermined trends. "The whole industry has set itself up to be the arbiters of taste, and fashion. Perception is manipulated," she says. "It's really hard to keep your eye on the ball of integrity. I have a lot of problems with it all, and I probably spend half my day just trying to work my way through how I can protect [myself]. But it's a young industry. I'm hoping it'll sort itself out someday soon."
This article was originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle.