Loreena McKennitt
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Here is my heart, I give it to you, —"The Neverending Road"
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A clouded dream on an earthly night —"The Mystic's Dream"
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Loreena McKennitt is a Canadian singer and musician. Her songs have a distinct Celtic and Middle Eastern tone (she's of Scottish descent), but are sometimes described as New Age. Her songs are often ballads, and often notable for a striking or romantic word portrait of a setting, and she's characterized by her high, echoing soprano voice. She found her calling to music after trying to be a veterinarian, and has since then sold more than 13 million copies of her albums. She's often compared to Enya as they both have Celt roots and use Gaelic in their music, but Loreena's music is more inspired by works of literature (most often Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake and William Butler Yeats) and is considered to be more grounded. Many of her songs have roots in English or Celtic folk songs, but more recently her music has been inspired by Arabian/Turkish lore.
She currently[when?] has ten albums, including two winter-themed albums:
- Elemental (1985)
- To Drive The Cold Winter Away (1987)
- Parallel Dreams (1989)
- The Visit (1991)
- The Mask And The Mirror (1994)
- A Winter Garden (1995)
- The Book of Secrets (1997)
- An Ancient Muse (2006)
- A Midwinter Night's Dream (2008)
- The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2010)
She was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023.
Loreena McKennitt provides examples of the following tropes:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: The Highwayman.
- An Asskicking Christmas: The King ..."We have powder and shot to conquer the lot, we have cannon and ball, to conquer them all." Yes this is a Christmas song.
- It makes a weird kind of sense. What better Christmas present would a King like from his subjects then powder and shot to fire at his enemies?
- Anonymous Band: Averted. While none of her band's members are known to the general public outside of her work, nor do they act as anything more than the background musicians to her Face of the Band, all of their names are always listed and credited in every album, and at concerts she makes an effort to give them all spotlight moments and even introductions at times.
- Arabian Nights Days: A heavy theme in both The Mask and the Mirror and An Ancient Muse.
- Badass Preacher: The Monk in Skellig in his younger years was a great traveler. He spent some time as a pilgrim-sailor apparently (being a pilgrim-sailor was a fashion among Celtish Monks in the Early Middle Ages).
- Bazaar of the Bizarre: Marakesh Night Market.
- Broken Bird: Quite literally in "Bonny Swans," a song inspired by the folk tale "The Twa Sisters."
- Charity Motivation Song: "Breaking the Silence", written for Amnesty International. A bit forced, but Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.
- Christmas Songs: To Drive the Cold Winter Away, A Winter Garden, and A Midwinter Night's Dream all have a number of such songs. Three of the five on A Winter Garden are traditional carols ("Coventry Carol", "Good King Wenceslas", and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"), but the entirety of A Midwinter Night's Dream is Christmas music, not merely winter-themed.
- Colonel Badass: Well sort of. She is the honorary colonel of the 435 Transport and Rescue Squadron.
- That's actually a throwback to the days when being a colonel was an aristocratic hobby, kind of like owning a baseball team in America, many colonel's did active service in other units and some weren't even soldiers. This tradition lives on in the Commonwealth where regiments sometimes carry an eighteenth century air to them.
- Composite Character: Although nothing in the song suggests it, the music video for "Bonny Swans" strongly implies that the harper who brings the youngest daughter as a harp to her father's hall is also the true love for whom her oldest sister drowned her; the actor and costume for both is the same. This does add a rather powerful resonance to the song's denouement, however.
- Crossing the Desert: Caravanserai
- The Crusades: The Scottish knight in English Lady and the Knight took the "cross divine" and died "in Palestine".
- Specifically he killed his lover's brother in anger and went off to atone. Kind of like joining the French Foreign Legion.
- Come to think of it most of the Crusader army was French anyway so that is in a way what it was.
- Specifically he killed his lover's brother in anger and went off to atone. Kind of like joining the French Foreign Legion.
- Everything's Louder with Bagpipes: Justified, since she is a Celtic-inspired musician.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Among the things mentioned in Caravanserai are the searing heat of the desert, the dangerous rivers they have to cross, the mighty mountains they have to climb. Oh yes and the years of war when someone is fighting someone else and will trample them if they are in the way. A caravaner sure earns his money.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Suggested by her rendition of Yeats' "Stolen Child", which begins and ends with a chorus of barking hunting dogs that have detected the poem's sinister faerie child thieves.
- The Fair Folk: Appearing in, and taking, the titular "Stolen Child". They claim to think of themselves as a rescue party taking the child from the woes of the mortal world.
- This of course is the normal excuse of human slavers
- Family-Unfriendly Death: In her retelling of the "Bonny Swans", the youngest sister is drowned so her older sister can have her man. She transforms into a swan... which then is turned into a harp.
- Foregone Conclusion: "The Death of Queen Jane".
- Geas: The Lady of Shalott has a curse upon her if she looks down on Camelot.
- Genre Shift: As implied by its title, the "Huron Beltane Fire Dance" starts off as a very tribal, Native American-sounding chant, then shifts into a Celtic-Irish string piece. Lampshaded in her documentary about her musical influences, where the first part accompanies a giant bonfire and the second half is set to Stock Footage of Irish step-dancers.
- The shift isn't as much as one might think. Before the Battle of Culloden Scottish Highland life was centered on kin groups and clientage systems that amounted to whole principalities of cousins. Not So Different in some ways from the Great Lakes tribes. And of course the whole system was enforced by vengeance, men got a reputation for their skill as warriors, etc. In both cultures.
- Green Aesop: "Bonny Portmore", complete with Reality Subtext. A bit of a Protest Song too.
- Harp of Femininity: The harp is one of her signature instruments along with rare Celtic instruments.
- Intrepid Merchant: Caravanserai is about caravaners going from town to town and stopping at aforesaid caravanserais (essentially open air stables and inns rather like a truck stop). Marco Polo is about the ultimate Intrepid Merchant.
- I Love the Dead: Implied, along with The Lost Lenore, at the end of "Annachie Gordon".
- Jewish Holidays: "Sacred Shabbat" is of course about the Sabbath. Which of course is Sacred.
- Lady of Adventure: As she says herself, most of her inspiration comes from her many travels.
- Literary Allusion Title: Aside from the songs which are directly taken from poems that reference literature ("The Lady of Shalott", "Cymbeline", "The Dark Night of the Soul", "The Two Trees", "Prospero's Speech", "The Highwayman", "The English Ladye and the Knight", and more), two songs also have more oblique allusions: "Dante's Prayer" references the fact she was reading the Inferno while riding a train through Siberia and contrasted the text with what she saw out the window; and "Penelope's Song" is written as a lament from Odysseus's wife waiting for him to come home.
- Merchant City: Marakesh (Marakesh Night Market), Venice (La Serenissima).
- More generically, Caravanserai as of course Merchant Cities have Caravanserais marked out.
- Mood Whiplash: Invoked in "The Death of Queen Jane"--while all the people outside are dancing, singing, and celebrating the birth of the heir, "poor Queen Jane...lay cold as a stone".
- Motif: Aside from her love of tragic ballads, a thread which begins in The Visit and weaves its way more fully into The Mask and the Mirror is that of the Unicorn. It first appears in "Courtyard Lullaby" (which also references the pomegranate tree, the fruit of which was often depicted in medieval times as the end of a unicorn's tail to represent the fecundity that was the unicorn's opposite), but images from the Unicorn Tapestries are used on the cover and liner sheets from The Mask and the Mirror, and in the music video for "Bonny Swans" both the characters of the song and Loreena herself are shown literally becoming part of the tapestries.
- My Girl Back Home: Penelope's Song
- Notable Original Music: Wrote the soundtrack for the made-for-TV documentary "Goddess Remembered". One song from this, "Ancient Pines", appears on Parallel Dreams.
- Proud Merchant Race: La Serenissima (which is the nickname of Venice, "The Most Serene Republic").
- Star-Crossed Lovers:
- "The Dark Night of the Soul" sounds like it's all about this -- a girl running off into the middle of the night to meet her lover. It's actually intended to be a spiritual allegory; the lyrics were taken from a poem by St. John of the Cross.
- But the allegory chosen was in fact that which is apparently close to the original-just because St. John was personally sworn to celibacy does not mean he was a prude. Moreover the idea of "Star crossed lovers" is a metaphor fairly comfortable with Christian theology if not usually expressed so graphically.
- Played straight in another song, "Annachie Gordon." They even die at the end.
- A possible interpretation of "Night Ride Across the Caucasus" though the song seems to have been purposely left vague.
- "The Dark Night of the Soul" sounds like it's all about this -- a girl running off into the middle of the night to meet her lover. It's actually intended to be a spiritual allegory; the lyrics were taken from a poem by St. John of the Cross.
- Recycled Soundtrack/Recycled Trailer Music: "The Mystic's Dream" was used in the soundtrack for The Mists of Avalon; "The Mummers' Dance" appeared in trailers for Ever After.
- Reformed Rake: The female lover of "As I Roved Out" seems to think she can turn her lover into one of these in the final verse, but from his reply she is out of luck.
- Signature Song: Probably "The Mystic's Dream". Or "The Mummers' Dance".
- Spoken Word in Music: "Dickens' Dublin" alternates between lyrics about a poor starving street urchin and a recording of an actual urchin narrating the story of the Nativity.
- Take Up My Sword: In Skeelig, a Monk spends his life in scholarship and then retires and bequeaths to the younger Monk that he mentored.
- Teenage Death Songs: Played with in "Standing Stones". The male lover dies young, but his lady lives on for years, lonely and tragic, before finally dying and joining him.
- War Is Hell: Beneath a Phyrgian Sky is about her walking along a Mediterranean shore, thinking about the wars that had happened there and musing about What a Senseless Waste of Human Life it was.
- The "Phyrgian Sky"(Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Eastern Mediterranean) would by the way have covered some of the most fought-over places in human history. So, Yeah.
- If you stretch that area into sort of a combative arc of fire to match the volcanic one in the Pacific, the "Phyrgian Sky" is not so far from, Troy and the Valley of Armageddon. Within that space come many another charming thought which I am sure comes to mind.
- The "Phyrgian Sky"(Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Eastern Mediterranean) would by the way have covered some of the most fought-over places in human history. So, Yeah.
- Yandere: Apparent in her song "Bonny Swans". See the page for more detail.