An album that harkens back to the earliest days of Loreena McKennitt’s career has been nominated for a 2024 Juno Award for Traditional Roots Album of the Year.
The Road Back Home was recorded during the summer of 2023 when she performed at four folk festivals in Southern Ontario. She was accompanied by cellist Caroline Lavelle and the Stratford-based Celtic band The Bookends, whose members include Errol Fischer, Miriam Fischer, Cait Watson, Pete Watson and Romano Di Nillo on whistle, fiddle, tenor banjo, guitar, bodhran, keyboard, accordion with McKennitt on harp.
“It is always gratifying and most humbling to be recognized by one’s industry,” said McKennitt as the nominees were announced last week. “But I think I, like many other artists, am just pressing on with what I love to do and where I find meaning in my life. I’m so grateful music found me.
“It is nice at the same time to be recognized and with this nomination,” she said. “What’s nice about it to me is when I really look back on it because this recording, a live recording that we did at four festivals … it really brought me back to my roots in Manitoba and when I first got interested in Celtic music.”
That thought led her to recall being part of a folk club that met on Sunday evenings in Winnipeg.
“It’s nice to feel there’s still an awareness of folk music and the role it can play in people’s lives,” she said.
This is the fourth Juno nomination for McKennitt, who also has multiple Grammy nominations and a pair of Juno wins under her belt. She’s slated to be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame next month.
The Road Back Home very much marked a return to her roots and includes many songs that date back to her earliest days on the folk circuit, some of which had remained unrecorded until now..
The 10-song album was meant to be an homage to what feels like simpler times. The early songs, the local musicians, the bursts of energy and spontaneity in those folk performances are what inspired the album, which she acknowledged was actually very much an afterthought.
“Performing together was the thing that called to us,” said McKennitt. “But we quickly realized there’s a special energy in those live performances, something that is hard to capture in the studio, plus the audiences were delightful. It was deeply moving to hear them joining us to sing ‘Wild Mountain Thyme.’
“We didn’t set out to make a record. We actually set out to just play at these festivals … the musicians I work with most of the time mostly don’t even live in Canada,” she noted.
It was also special for her to connect with The Bookends and work together on a 60-minute live set.
“Once it got close to the performances … I thought, well, why don’t we record them as well because you never know,” she said. “Maybe there will be some value in it.”
McKennitt also values the different feel there is to a live recording.
“I think the other thing about live recordings versus studio recordings is there is that extra electricity and energy that’s involved, that dynamic that works between an audience … I can hear that in our performance,” said McKennitt.
“There’s a kind of vulnerability that doesn’t exist in the studio, so you’re a bit more on the edge … also feeding off the energy of the audience.”
The Juno Awards will be presented March 30 in Vancouver.
