Stratford singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt has announced a Canadian concert tour in celebration of her 1991 album The Visit, “a very important stepping stone” that helped springboard her onto the international music stage 30 years ago.
McKennitt will perform the Juno Award-winning album in its entirety when she takes the stage in Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto, Quebec, and Ottawa at the beginning of October. Tickets for The Visit Revisited – McKennitt’s first tour since her Lost Souls Tour in 2018 – are available on her website now.
“This album was a major landmark in my career,” McKennitt said, “and personally it’s always so interesting and often enlightening to revisit one’s early work to see how the inspiration for it has evolved.”
In 1991, McKennitt had wrapped up a 30-concert Canadian tour in support of her third album, Parallel Dreams, which she released through her Stratford-based independent label Quinlan Road in 1989. That record – which sold nearly 100,000 copies in Canada – included music from an EP McKennitt created during a short-lived artist development deal with PolyGram Records a year earlier.
“It was tricky with the record companies,” McKennitt recalled. “(PolyGram) really didn’t know what to do with it, so they passed.”
Encouraged by the response her traditional Celtic folk music was receiving at small venues and halls in Canada (or while busking at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market), McKennitt continued to look for ways to engage audiences elsewhere. For The Visit, she struck a licensing deal with Warner Music Group that would give her next record more reach.
Produced by McKennitt and a long-time collaborator, jazz guitarist Brian Hughes, The Visit ended up selling around 1.4 million copies worldwide and earned McKennitt her first Juno for Best Roots and Traditional Album of the Year in 1992.
“From a business and from a career standpoint that was probably the most significant thing about that time,” McKennitt said. “It certainly was an unusual recording from an industry standpoint. It was a real revelation to the … industry that music that wasn’t overly commercial in its nature still could have a lot of attraction for people. I think that was a revelation to us all, and gratifying for me.”
Musically, The Visit also laid a foundation McKennitt would continue to build on as her career began flourishing internationally.
“As I learned more about the history of the Celts, I started allowing myself the license to bring in some other ethnic ingredients,” McKennitt said. “The creative elements of that was a turning point for where I was going to head to next.”
That included the Middle Eastern influences she has since woven into her arrangements, a creative departure from earlier work McKennitt describes now as “more modest and more traditional.”
Prior to the pandemic McKennitt put her music career on hold in 2019 to spend more time in Stratford, where she’s since spoken publicly about civic affairs, climate change and Indigenous issues. She returned to the stage in Stratford in December before headlining a pair of concerts in London benefiting international aid efforts in Ukraine.
“I believe it’s possible to get back to touring even while keeping a foot in those things back home,” she said. “I felt then, as I do now, that it’s important to be a contributing member of one’s community.”
McKennitt will be joined on her upcoming tour by Hughes and other long-time musical companions Caroline Lavelle on cello and Hugh Marsh on violin. After performing The Visit, the second half of each show will include a set of selections from across McKennitt’s catalogue.
“Even at the best of times, to last 30 years (in the music business) feels like an accomplishment, particularly in these last few years,” McKennitt said. “There’s enough interest in us going out into these venues again and it’s quite gratifying, I think, to be able to look forward to getting out and performing.”