Loreena McKennitt

Demetris Kollalous

Loreena McKennitt: Queen of pan-Celtic music, high collars.

Details

Loreena McKennitt performs 7:30 p.m. Monday, October 8, at Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana, 713-629-3700. A longer version of this interview will be posted Friday on www.houstonpress.com.

Related Content

• Crazy for Crawfish at The Hideaway
  April 24, 2012
• Mudbug Music: The Perfect Soundtrack for Your Next Crawfish Boil
  March 23, 2012
• Where Are We Drinking?
  March 27, 2012
• Where Are We Eating?
  March 12, 2012
• Bee Rustlers Steal Haven's Hives
  March 12, 2012

More About

• Lorena McKennitt
• Wildlife
• Nature and the Environment

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Canada's Lorena McKennitt established herself as the queen of pan-Celtic music with 1998's double-platinum smash The Book of Secrets, and the two-time Juno winner's seventh LP, An Ancient Muse, shimmers with the hallmarks of her transcendent vision. Evoking the dark soul of the night, its exquisite introspection and otherworldliness point out that McKennitt's quest is spiritual as well as musical, and listeners are merely pilgrims on her journey. The well-traveled McKennitt — from cattleman stock herself, though she laughingly admits she has yet to buy a cowboy hat — recently explained by phone how her journeys often find their way into her music, the way a Mediterranean voyage not long ago led to Muse's "Caravanserai."

"I am fascinated [with] places and times where cultures meet and challenge one's identity," she says in a voice warm as firelight. "From time to time on the Anatolian plain [in Turkey], I would come across these fortified structures in varying states of decay. Some were very well-preserved, and some were just skeletons, almost like beached whales in the archways that remained."

These places were known as caravanserais, McKennitt explains, way stations for merchants traveling the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road. "The travelers could get food, rest [and] collect themselves," she ways. "Wrapped around these caravanserais would be bazaars comprised of local people — different cultures passing through, interfacing with more sedentary cultures with food, music, stories and ideas."