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{{creator}}
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[[File:B000J233SK_2446.jpg|thumb|350px]]
{{quote|''Here is my heart, I give it to you,''
''Take me with you across this land...''
|"The Neverending Road" }}
{{quote|''A clouded dream on an earthly night''
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''Where the heart moves the stones''
''It's there that my heart is longing''
''All for the love of you''
|"The Mystic's Dream" }}
'''Loreena McKennitt''' is a [[Canadian Music|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
* ''Elemental'' (1985)
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* ''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.
{{creatortropes}}
* [[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 Sense in Context| It makes a weird kind of sense.]] [[Fridge
* [[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."
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* [[Geas]]: The Lady of Shalott has a curse upon her if she looks down on Camelot.
* [[Genre Shift]]: As implied by [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|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 [[The Clan|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 [[The Odyssey|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 Trope|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".
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* [[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.
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* [[Spoken Word in Music]]: "Dickens' Dublin" [[Mood Dissonance|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.
**[[Fridge Brilliance|Take up my pen?]]
* [[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 [[Up to Eleven|the Valley of Armageddon]]. Within that space come many another charming thought which I am sure comes to mind.
* [[Yandere]]: Apparent in her song "Bonny Swans". See the page for more detail.
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{{Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee}}
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