Photo by Richard Haughton
Loreena McKennitt
Loreena McKennitt
Over the course of an average year, Loreena McKennitt takes on a few different professional duties. They seldom overlap, in the sense that when McKennitt is songwriting, she’s not working on the promotional aspects of her musical career. When she’s booking a tour, she’s not spending time in the studio. When she’s working on the varied aspects of her Quinlan Road record label, other work components get pushed to the side. She will perform Nov. 7 at the Pabst Theater.
“So the way I've had to manage the situation is to build in time for the artist or windows of time for the artist to either go out and do some research, as I've been prone to do over the past few decades, or the time to write, or time to record, or time to tour,” McKennitt said. “Between those times, I’m not functioning as an artist much at all. So it’s not like I’m wandering around and, ‘Oh, I’ve got this creative idea,’ and the next thing I’m up to my ears in a budget or the logistics of a tour. It’s just really impossible for me to work that way. You know, we stop touring for a bit, and then I go and do some research and do some writing and I'll carve out three or four months at a time to do that, where everything is logistically quiet. And I just have to work from that side of my brain. Then once I've got things, you know, starting to be written, then we start getting into the recording studio.”
Surprising, perhaps, is the fact that she works in these silos to the degree that music—the creation of it, the rehearsing for tour, etc. – can be placed on a backburner for weeks, even months if the other aspects of her life demand her time.
“Well, I probably work a lot differently than many other artists,” she said. “I don’t even function as an artist a lot of the time. I spend a lot of time managing my career.”
Avid Explorer
And here’s another pull on her time: travel. An avid explorer of world cultures, McKennitt is one to travel with a purpose, landing in a country or region or province intending some immersive time in that place’s music and overall culture.
Travel is often the precursor to the studio. “I’m a lover of travel, and for writing the very first step is that I go out and do research and meet different kinds of people,” she said. “I’ll read about the history of the places, which have been anywhere from Siberia, Morocco, Mongolia. I write lyrics and melodies and chords and so on.”
And McKennitt has long had a handle on what her fans like. As with some of the other tasks noted above, she’s kept an old-fashioned mailing list going for quite some time, keeping up a conversation with her most-ardent fans via the classic means of the written word and the post office. These days, she’s still inclined to keep social media at bay. In fact, she can (and will) discuss at length her rationale for cutting out social media from her career, citing writers like Malcolm Gladwell, academic studies and her own anecdotal experiences to show that the form’s not a necessity for a “legacy artist” such as herself.
That said, she still needs and wants to reach her audience. As with this fall’s touring, she put out word of tours well in advance, hoping that word of mouth and tried-and-true approaches like newspaper ads will allow her to find her people. Many of her fans have been around for decades and are used to keeping track on her tours and albums through whatever means.
As McKennitt put it, she’s among “that category of artists got their career built to a certain scale before this digital tsunami came in. And so people knew me and knew my disposition. I tried to keep our physical newsletters going as long as we could. We still have newsletters that go out to a mailing list that we manage. We don’t farm that off to anybody. I have somebody here in my office that personally responds to fan mail. So my constituency has learned also that over the years. And I’m constantly—even at my own financial expense or time and everything else—trying to look out for the quality of their experience and the integrity of their experience. So they know me now. They know my position with respect to connection technologies, and they know that they can rely that I'm not going to be on any Instagram or Snapchat or Tik Tok or anything else showing them what I ate for breakfast. They know I'm trying.”
