Smouldering Ashes Mckennitt

To commemorate the 30th-anniversary of her breakthrough album, Mask And The Mirror, Loreena McKennitt presents this live album recorded in San Francisco on May 19, 1994. Featuring staples from the McKennitt canon, including “The Mystic's Dream,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Marrakesh Night Market” and “The Two Trees.”

Live in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts is an six-track mini-album of the Canadian singer, songwriter, accordionist, harpist, and pianist, Loreena McKennitt. It was recorded live in San Francisco during a concert at the Palace of Fine Arts, on 19 May 1994 and released 1 year later. Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Loreena McKennitt is one of Canada's most beloved national artists, a folk chanteuse, and a new age troubadour who made her breakthrough in the mid-'80s with her literate and oft-experimental focus on Celtic-tinged traditional and original material, coupled with her haunting harp playing.

Loreena McKennitt's fourth release, and first for a major label, is a quietly majestic tapestry of worldbeat and Celtic pop that effortlessly weaves together traditional and contemporary songs into lush showcases for her fluid voice and harp. The multi-talented Canadian utilizes all of her strengths here, resulting in her most rewarding batch of tunes to date. With larger production values and more ambitious arrangements than the sparse Elemental and Parallel Dreams, her flair for the dramatic and the theatrical runs rampant throughout. Whether she's toasting the souls of the departed with Pagan glee on the delicious "All Souls Night," or reinterpreting King Henry VIII's "Greensleeves" through Tom Waits, it's never without both feet in the water.

On March 8, 2024, the Canadian artist and winner of the Juno Award will release a new album. She is returning to the origins of her career and this time devoting herself more to traditional Celtic music.

To commemorate the 30th-anniversary of her breakthrough album, Mask And The Mirror, Loreena McKennitt presents this live album recorded in San Francisco on May 19, 1994. Featuring staples from the McKennitt canon, including “The Mystic's Dream,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Marrakesh Night Market” and “The Two Trees.”

Recorded in various halls and abbeys in Ireland, and completed in the Church of Our Lady in Guelph, Ontario, harpist/arranger/vocalist Loreena McKennitt's first foray into the crowded field of holiday music – she would go on to release an EP called Winter Garden in 1995 – is steeped in old-world atmosphere. To Drive the Cold Winter Away celebrates the winter solstice through eight traditional English, Scottish, and Irish carols and ballads and two Mckennitt originals. The artist's reverence for her source material is moving, and her meticulous yet simple arrangements help tracks such as "The Wexford Carol," "The Kings," and "Let Us the Infant Greet" resonate with all of the grace and piousness that the lyrics and poems strive for. McKennitt has succeeded in making a beautiful, haunting, and ambitious yuletide song cycle that despite taking itself a little too seriously, ranks among her finest.

Loreena McKennitt recorded her 1985 debut on a farm in southern Ontario, a pastoral setting that infuses every note on Elemental with atmosphere and rustic simplicity. What's immediately striking is the Canadian harpist's fully realized voice. Most artists take years to hone their pipes, and that McKennitt brings a nearly finished version to the table on her first outing is not only notable, it's revelatory. McKennitt presents an evenly distributed mix of new age and contemporary Celtic that evokes the work of Enya, Clannad, and Capercaille, adapting the words of Yeats ("Stolen Child") and Blake ("Lullaby") as effortlessly as she rearranges traditional folk songs like "The Blacksmith" or "Banks of Claudy." Elemental may not have the worldbeat scope or acrobatic arrangements inherent in her later works, but its epic balladry and relative sparseness offers an intriguing look at the artist at her most subtle.