On March 8, 2024, Juno Award-winning Canadian artist Loreena McKennitt will be releasing a new album that harkens back to the earliest days of her career and the more traditional forms of Celtic music.
The Road Back Home was recorded during the summer of 2023 when she performed at four folk festivals in southern Ontario. It was a return to her roots, the early songs, the local musicians, the bursts of energy and the spontaneity in those local performances that inspired this new album.
The album features 10 songs, including many pieces that date back to McKennitt’s earliest days on the folk circuit and which have remained unrecorded until now.
The Road Back Home will be released on CD, 180g vinyl and via digital music services including a Dolby Atmos mix by Jeff Wolpert.
Based in Stratford, Ontario since the early 1980s, several years ago McKennitt serendipitously encountered a group of local Celtic musicians. A meeting of musical minds ensued, resulting in an impromptu collaboration as part of her 2021 Christmas concerts (released as Under A Winter's Moon in 2022).
These musicians accompanied McKennitt again this summer at the Ontario folk festivals, along with her long-time band mate, cellist Caroline Lavelle. In the spirit of the tradition, one show featured an unplanned guest vocal on “Wild Mountain Thyme” from Canadian singersongwriter James Keelaghan.
Although recognized today as a cultural cross-pollinator and a ground-breaking leader of the contemporary Celtic Music scene, McKennitt's journey began in the humble folk clubs and the nascent festival scenes of her childhood home in Western Canada.
She recalls it vividly: “My time in Winnipeg would lead me to perform at folk clubs and one of the earliest Winnipeg Folk Festivals. We all got lost in the magic of the music which infused the summer night air. And on Sunday night when the festival came to an end, all the artists gathered on stage, linking arms to sing ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’."
Initially influenced by the 1960s and 1970s revival of interest in the folk music of both Ireland and England, McKennitt revelled in the recordings of the Bothy Band, Planxty, Steeleye Span and Alan Stivell, among many others. It was during these humble beginnings, including a tour of the busker pitches of Vancouver, Toronto, Dublin and London, England, that the foundations were laid for a four-decade career as a multi-platinum recording artist, entrepreneur and concert performer.