The Road Back Home Mckennitt

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.

Exploring more traditional forms of Celtic music, Loreena McKennitt's brilliant 2024 release The Road Back Home marks an inspired return to her roots. The album features 10 songs, including many pieces that date back to McKennitt's earliest days on the folk circuit and which have remained unrecorded until now. Although recognized today as a cultural cross-pollinator and a ground-breaking leader of the contemporary Celtic Music scene, McKennitt's journey began in the humble folk clubs and the nascent festival scenes of her childhood home in Western Canada.

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.