Song:All Souls Night
Album:The Journey So Far: The Best of Loreena McKennitt
Loreena McKennitt has had international success with her brand of Celtic music. She had her greatest success with the 1997 top ten hit The Mummers Dance. She was born Feb. 17, 1957 in Morden, MB which is a Mennonite community. Her parents were from Ireland and Scotland. Those are her influences. While studying to be a veterinarian at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, she got into folk music with a particular interest in Celtic music. After visiting Ireland to see it for herself, she learned to play harp and moved to Toronto to raise money for an album. In 1981 she joined the Stratford Festival. She still lives in Stratford. She released her debut album Elemental in 1985. She records for her own Quinlan Road label. All Souls Night is from the 1991 album The Visit. For that album she signed an international distribution deal with Warner Bros. That deal alone increased sales. Then she scored a top ten pop hit with a remix of her 1997 song The Mummers Dance. The 1997 album The Book of Secrets was certified 2XPlatinum. Though Loreena does occasionally perform traditional songs, she writes most of her songs including All Souls Night and Mummers Dance. Both songs are on this 2CD comp. The first CD is a Best Of. The second CD is a live recording. All Souls Night is on the second CD. If you want the original recording of All Souls Night, The Visit is available on CD. After the 1998 death of her fiancee Ronald Rees, his brother Richard and friend Gregory Cook in a boating accident, Loreena founded the Cook-Rees Memorial Fund for Water Search and Safety. All the proceeds for the 1999 album Live in Paris and Toronto went to the fund. It raised $3M. At that point, Loreena seemed to retire. But she returned with the 2006 album An Ancient Muse and the PBS special Nights From The Alhambra. She was the narrator for the 2008 Disney movie Tinker Bell. Her latest CD Lost Souls was released in 2018 still on her own label distributed by Universal. She toured to support the album and then announced on her website that she was going on hiatus to concentrate on The Stolen Child Project at the Falstaff Family Centre in Stratford. She doesn't know when or if she will return to music. Here's Loreena McKennitt performing All Souls Night from the 2007 PBS special Nights From The Alhambra. This is available on DVD and you can stream the entire show for free on Vimeo.
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