Thirty-two years after its original release, Loreena McKennitt’sThe Mask and Mirror returns in a Definitive Edition, complete with sleeve notes, original artwork, photographs, interviews and dress rehearsal recordings from her own archive. The reissue arrives as the Canadian singer-songwriter takes the album back on the road, with a full performance of it planned for Europe next year. Along the way, she talks about the lessons history still has to teach us, the pull of vinyl and CDs in the streaming era, and why she worries about the impact and risks of AI.
Welcome to Loreena McKennit
Hello, Miriam. Buongiorno, come stai? [Good afternoon, how are you?]
Everything is fine. How are you, Loreena?
I’m well and I’m really happy that today you managed to meet with me and that you were able to accommodate this short chat. First of all, I want to thank you again for the interview and I want to ask you how are you and how the tour is treating you?
Oh, I’m well. We finally got through our first performance. That’s always the big leap going from, because we actually hadn’t performed a concert since we wrapped up our summer of 2024 performance in Milano. And so it was the first performance since July of 2024. But we had a good couple of days rehearsing in Montreal. And so it started well.
Revisiting The Mask and the Mirror
Thank you. Well, first of all, there is a lot going on currently. Now, there is this Canadian tour. But also there is, which is connected to the re-release of The Mask and the Mirror, which is called A Definitive Edition. My first question was, how did it feel to go back to revisit that material for, you know, piling up this Definitive Edition? Because it’s also in a way going through memory lane in a way.
Yes, yes, yes. Well, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting exercise because, you know, the world and life is so fast and busy now that there isn’t much time to reflect back much of the past unless one is forced to do so through a project like this. But it was interesting from the standpoint of reflecting on the evolution of my fascination of the Celts, the history of the Celts, that began really in earnest at that exhibition in Venice, I think 1991 or 92, and that showed that the Celts were this vast collection of tribes that had fanned out across Europe and into Asia Minor and dated back to about 500 BC.
Trying to figure it out
And that occurred at a very critical junction of my career because I was trying to figure out which direction I was going creatively. Was I going to lean more into the traditional repertoire? But when I looked at what was happening in that part of the world, there were a lot of musicians who I felt were performing and working through the traditional repertoire far better than I felt I could. And at the same time, I’d always had, and I still have a passion for musical, for travel writing.
So I thought, hmm, maybe I could pursue the history of the Celts and weave that into my music and my lyrics and use it as a kind of creative springboard. So it marked a pretty important juncture for me. I thought I would start in the northwest corner of Spain in Galicia, which was the Celtic corner. And through the lens of that history, that it opened up the history of Spanish history. And you can’t really understand much of or appreciate much of Spanish history without taking on board North Africa and particularly Morocco. So it was interesting to reflect back on that whole journey.
There were a couple of trips that I took through Spain and through Morocco that informed a lot of the music. As well as still hearkening back to some of the Irish time, the time I’d spent in Ireland that is reflected in a piece like Two Trees.
Loreena McKennit: “I never dreamed about having a career or life in music or singing”
Yeah, I mean, this album for me has also personal, it’s one of my favorites in my playlist ever. I also understand from your words, Loreena, that this album has been pivotal for your career in a way. Because without that travel, without that journey, you wouldn’t understand which way to, you know, to cross, to walk through.
Yes, I mean, it was so, you know, my whole career is this kind of unintended consequence. Because I wanted to be a veterinarian, right? So I never dreamed about having a career or life in music or singing. I sang all my life in choirs and music festivals and so on. So in a sense, there was something else that was pulling me along, and I was prepared to surrender to it, or at least give it some time and some opportunities. There was nobody else that I was modeling my career on, because many artists will write about their own personal lives. They’ll mine all of those life experiences to create their songs. That isn’t what I really wanted to do.
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”
It was, as I said, when I look back now, so much of it has been an act of musical travel writing. But it wasn’t that I knew where I was going. And, you know, this harkens to this quote of Lao Tzu, “a good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”. And in that is a deep philosophical point that, you know, and a certain measure of humility lies at the bottom of it. We may think we know where we’re going, we may think we know what we want, but in actual fact. We’re part of a much, much bigger picture of life and the natural world and all that comes with it. That you do have to surrender to it to some degree, or at least through humility, appreciate that as a human species, we only have control over so much.
Loreena McKennit and the road of the Celts
Yeah, there are some wise words that I think that, you know, people should just listen to them. And, you know, and deal with them because we can plan the whole, our entire existence. But then something unexpected comes and you need to deal with it and you are not ready. That’s also the teaching I get from this album also, because this album, as you said, between your words, it brought you through a discovery in a way. Also for yourself as an artist, not just the Celts per se.
Yes, yes. No, I mean, the road of the Celts was really the vehicle through which I allowed myself to learn about other cultures. About the role of religion and spirituality and how that informs one’s self-awareness. So the history of the road of the Celts was just, on the most part, a convenient path. But I wandered well off that path or to very tangential places.
Cohabiting together
But I felt that in the end, finding the title of a recording is always very, very important. And I realized early on through that examination of Spanish history, where there had been at one time, you know, the Judaic and the Islamic or the Muslim and the Christian communities did cohabitate to a degree. And as a Canadian, you know, I relate to that. We have many, many cultures and many religious. And on the most part, we all hang together. In fact, we really celebrate. In fact, just yesterday, some of my, you know, Turkish Muslim friends were inviting me over for supper. I mean, these are, you know, average, everyday people. They don’t look at me as the artist and so on.
Loreena McKennit: “We have a need for a sense of self-determination”
There’s something really important about looking at our mutual humanity. And in these contemporary times where so much is at stake and so much is being distorted through technology and social media and so on, we have to remember that at the end of the day, we are human beings. We have some, and this was probably one of the most important lessons I was learning again and again. But really started with The Mask and Mirror, that we are all pretty much all the same the world over. We need to be and we want to be loved. We need to belong, we have a need for a sense of self-determination. And these universal and timeless principles are so much at work.
History is repeating itself
Yeah, I think that we should, again, take with us all the teaching from history, because I feel when I listen to your words, like, how is possible that history didn’t teach us anything? And we are repeating history itself like it happened, yeah, centuries ago. And still we are not learning anything. Yeah, we are used to conhabit all together with different, you know, religious beliefs. But it seems like we have forgotten that.
Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, when I examine the potential contributing factors to that, one is, and I think every country and probably every province or state or, you know, sub-jurisdiction which has control over education and curriculum. That is a good part of it. I see the erosion of the humanities and particularly history being taught in our Canadian schools. I see that as a diminishing aspect of the curriculum and teachers who have been taught to teach that curriculum. So there’s that factor.
The unregulated technology
The second almost overarching, very powerful factor, of course, is the unregulated technology, the social media. And, you know, of course, now we’ve got AI and deep fakes and so on. So these two forces coming together almost conspire that people will not know their history. And yet, you know, I remember reading this quote of S.M. Sigerson: “a country who does not know its history is like a person who’s kind of dementia”. And that it is at our peril that we do not know that. So I think, you know, I also run a family center in Stratford. I purchased this heritage building 26 years ago and transformed it into a family center.
Loreena McKennit: “We all need to be soldiers of democracy, human rights and the rule of law”
And on the front fence, there is a banner that we created and it says Canadians value democracy, human rights and the rule of law and defending it begins at home. And this is where I think we’re at. I think we all need to be soldiers of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. We no longer can offshore it to some other body to do. But anyway, this gets away from The Mask and Mirror.
People do not discuss the risks of AI
No, no, no—I mean, you are completely right. I am genuinely in awe of hearing you speak so openly about this. Generally speaking, people do not discuss the risks of AI—or the role of social media—in the way you do. You are well known for your critical perspective, and I share your concerns because I am also seeing how these risks are affecting education. I am currently finishing my thesis, and my tutor recently told me, “I’m unable to distinguish between what you have written and what I might have written myself.” So I sit hours here reading, writing my thesis and having discussion with my partner about when I deliver in, while other students, they don’t care about that and they throw into everything on AI. So I’m starting to think it’s where we are headed in the future. I don’t want that.
No, I think, you know, when I do a straw poll, that I’m not hearing a lot of people clamoring for AI. I mean, it’s been put into everyone’s software, you know, now you go to Google, and they do the AI summary. And so they’re playing on our tendency for an appetite for convenience and efficiency. These two things, I feel, have been big Trojan horses, that we’ve really not understood the value of moving slowly, of analyzing, processing, speaking to each other, working out our differences.
AI, child development, and controversy
And this is certainly one of the many concerns that the child development experts have about children and chatbots or children and AI, is that you have to learn at a young age to work out your differences or to work out certain situations, how to navigate space and so on. We’ve allowed ourselves to become dependent, hugely dependent and addicted to this stuff. So I think, but I do see a number of people being exhausted by this whole, and feeding the threat of jobs that’s coming with AI. Of course, then all the controversy about the, and rightfully so, about the data centers. And my hope is that, again, these companies are trying to get ahead of the regulations.
They do not want regulations. And my hope is that we have enough innate wisdom and survival instincts in each of ourselves to say, this is just going too far too fast. I can’t understand the very basics of it. And we could go and endlessly speaking about it i’m sorry
No, no, no—I’m really happy that there are people like you, Loreena, who are willing to take a stand and talk about these things. Even if it feels like just a drop in the ocean, I’m happy to do it, you know?
The Mask and the Mirror: fastforwarding to 2026 (part1)
We were talking about The Mask and the Mirror, which was released in 1994—32 years ago—and is now being reissued as the definitive edition. You have to face a new generation of listeners who approach music in a completely different way. How does that feel for you?
I was born in 1989, so I’m still used to having a CD player, sitting down, and really enjoying my music. Younger generations seem to want everything fast, fast, fast—and Spotify gives them exactly that. How do you feel about this change?
The Mask and the Mirror: fastforwarding to 2026 (part 2)
It’s hard for me to say because I don’t have a very much interaction with that generation what I glean it is more reading from ther very reputable people who are studying these kinds of things. I mean, we are seeing, we have seen over the past, I don’t know, seven, eight years, or maybe 10, I can’t remember, a resurgence to a degree of vinyl.
It’s still a very niche group, the vinyl, it doesn’t come anywhere close to what vinyl once was before the internet. And, and we’re actually starting to see a little rise in a similar way with CDs. And it’s hard to say who this is or exactly what’s going on. But I know that there is a curiosity. There’s not, you know, the people that were born just in the past few decades, never really experienced much of the analog world to have a sense of nostalgia for it.
But there is a real curiosity because of exploring. And we see, again, I think we see this in these analog kinds of experiences. So it’s hard to say, you know, goes back to the seductiveness of efficiency and convenience, as well as price point, because with the subscription models of streaming like Spotify, you know, where you get paid 10 cents per thousand plays, or on Google Play, you might get 0.00013 cents per play. You literally have to be in the millions to start making any money that you can survive on.
Loreena McKennit: “I think are signs that they’re looking for something richer”
So there’s a lot of ingredients conspiring for young people to be discouraged from finding or tasting or trying out that slower analog experience that used to be also consumed communally, where people would sit and listen to music together, they would share their albums, and so on and so forth. And I think that this loneliness epidemic that has incurred concurrently to this technological outlaw era, that people are now out of almost innate necessity trying to find those other experiences that are just simply more gratifying and more enriching. So I don’t know. I mean, for me, like I say I don’t know enough about that but I do see what I think are signs that they’re looking for something richer.
Physically digging into the archives
You know what also in my eyes makes attractive this new edition is that there are sleeve notes, the original artwork photographs, interviews, dress rehearsal, audio performances which all was all in your archive. So you went into digging those archives in a way and how then did you choose the material because then I can guess that in those times, yeah, in the 90s, everything was paper, physical. So you had Betamax, you had all those sorts, you know, supports.
Now that you put your finger on it [laughs]. I mean, it’s so true. And when one thinks about, let’s say, endeavoring to do a project, let’s say my most recent sort of studio recording, but which was not part of the lineage of the Celts, the history of the Celts, which the Lost Souls. I mean, it was in an era where, well, certainly there wasn’t the research and the travel. But the point that I really want to make is that everything became digitized.
Loreena McKennit: “A lot of the original materials on tape”
And I think archivists and historians must be absolutely out of their mind with grief because it is so difficult to find or keep these kinds of records as they were in the pre-digital era. So it was very gratifying on that score. We have a warehouse and we have our materials and to go through the physical pictures, to go through the physical clippings, to go and watch the things on, you know, we had transferred them to CD, you know, just for viewing purposes. But indeed, you know, a lot of the original materials on tape.
There’s something gratifying…
And there’s something gratifying, at least for me, for my mind, and accountable when you can see it, put your hands on it, touch it, rather than all this information being held hostage in the cloud somewhere. Of course, the cloud are glorified data centers consuming energy, water, farmland and more. That’s the price of this. And we’ve lost ownership of it. We’ve lost the tangible ownership of it. It’s shocking. You know, I think this aspect of archival material is hugely, the loss of it, I think it’s hugely underappreciated from a historian standpoint.
“They were not honest and forthright with their business model”
Absolutely. I agree with you. It is easy to say, “I store everything in the cloud, so I do not care,” but the reality is that we all use these services, and you are not alone in doing so. As I study this subject, I also think about the hidden cost: although companies provide free cloud storage, what do we give up in return? Our data contains pieces of our lives. When we store personal memories—such as photographs from a close friend’s wedding—in the cloud, we are effectively entrusting a part of our lives to someone else.
They were not honest and forthright with their business model. At the very front end that nothing is for free and they got that they’ve really what their business model has been. Let’s say a lot of the social media has been scraping people’s data. And that data has been regarded for at least a decade or more as the new oil. Then, that data is used to sell advertising and their money comes from advertising.
“So we’ve lost control, access of our own material”
And so we’ve lost control, access of our own material, our own information. Not only is it in a massive invasion of privacy for which the privacy laws around the world have not been able to keep in touch up to date. It’s really having clear, clean, unequivocal access. You’re good as your next update, as I often say. And even with the cars, one day when all of this, all of it’s running on software, well, they’ll have the complete hostage taking in our cars. Well, if you didn’t pay for the update or the subscription model, you’re not pulling out of your driveway.
The Mask and Mirror tour celebrations officially was started in…
Now, Loreena, before concluding our chat, I wanted to recall that next year you’re going to come to Europe and you’re going to tour The Mask and the Mirror in its entirety. So it’s going to be also special for that.
It is. I wish we were coming back to Italy. So just, you didn’t ask the question [laughs], but I’ll voluntarily offer the answer. In the spring of 2024, we toured in Europe, more of Northern Europe. This is often what we’ll do, more Northern Europe in the springtime when we come to Southern Europe in the summer. That way we can add on Greece and Turkey and other places. For reasons that I’m trying to recall, we started doing The Mask and Mirror tour in the summer of 2024. And we actually performed it in Italy at that time.
The upcoming European tour
I can remember, even though I wasn’t there, but I can remember.
So we did it without the benefit of the definitive edition. So we felt this time we’re going to finish up The Mask and Mirror tour European experience. But it feels, I must confess, it feels a bit awkward not going back to Italy and Spain in particular on this tour. I’m not sure. Maybe we should have. But anyway, this is where we’re at. It will be for the next time. I forgot the question now.
Closing words
Well, I’m really happy that you are bringing back on tour this amazing album, Loreena, and I want to thank you for your time and your wise words, because in 30 minutes of interviews, I got much more wise words from you than a politician, you know. So thank you again for your words and your wiseness.
Grazie. Wonderful, wonderful speaking with you. It’s always nice when it becomes more of a conversation than, you know, here’s the next drip, drip question.
So thank you again.
That goes both ways. Grazie.