“Anniversaries are usually occasions to kind of stop the clock and look back at where you’ve come from and where you are now and how you’ve changed. It’s always a sobering exercise to look back at your work!”
Says Canadian artist Loreena McKennitt when asked about how she feels about the 30th anniversary of her the Juno Award-winning album that propelled her onto the international stage, “The Visit.”
The Visit: The Definitive Edition is now out and it features plenty of unreleased and fascinating material.
The original album, recorded in 1991, has since sold more than two million copies across more than 40 countries and is viewed as a defining, page-turning moment in the Canadian artist’s career.
“Thirty years seems like a long time, no matter how you measure it,” says McKennitt. “Looking back as through a picture frame, one can better see what that period was in its context. I’ve heard from so many people how this recording became a kind of soundtrack for their lives around the time it was released in the early 1990s.”
“I made my first ever recording in 1985 and I built my career from the grassroots until 1990 which is when I started reaching the attention of labels here in Canada. That meant that I went from selling 20 thousand copies to hundreds of thousands worldwide. You can imagine that when I was making The Visit my music had reached a whole new level of popularity”
When asked if anything in her music and act changed since then she state:
“I don’t think I have, to be honest! Like I said before, it’s really interesting to go back and see what was on your mind back then compared to now and my mind hasn’t really changed! I’m still fascinated by the same ideas and concepts that drove me to write this record.”
What she have done anything differently, though?
“You know, there’s always a margin of improvement in all of your work but I like to look at my music as little vignettes of my life. I’ve always loved travel writing and songs can almost be seen as short stories if you think about it”
Which is a cogent point given that this release features a deluxe limited-edition, hardback book format containing four CDs and one audio Blu-ray disc, a 32-page illustrated booklet and hours of previously unreleased content including the first-ever surround sound mixes of Loreena’s music.
“I think very often people are very curious about what informed some of the decisions that were made during the recording process and so forth. So this is my way to re organize this record as if it was musical travel writing. It’s my way of letting my fans know a little more about why I like to do things differently and in an usual way.”
The booklet features four essays written by Loreena, a personal reminiscence of her unconventional rise to fame by former Warner Music Canada executive Dave Tollington and period archival photos that have never before been published.
