Loreena McKennitt - The Road Back Home (2024) [Hi-Res]

Loreena’s new album, The Road Back Home, is an homage to simpler times, offering comfort, warmth and familiarity. It’s like going home.

The album was recorded last summer when Loreena performed at four folk festivals in Ontario, Canada. It’s a joyous return to her roots, a kind of musical winding back to the beginning of her career, her earliest days on the folk circuit and its characteristic culture of community.

The Road Back Home is set for release on March 8th – just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s available on CD, 180-gram black vinyl, via digital music services (including Dolby Atmos) and in retail stores. The album features 10 songs, many of which have remained unrecorded until now.

“There are so many ways to define the meaning of home,” says Loreena. “It may well be the structure in which we live, but it can also be the cultural expressions of community which somehow reach into our hearts and souls and draw us together without us completely understanding why.”

A group of Celtic musicians (The Bookends) she met in her home base of Stratford accompanied her at the summer folk festivals, along with long-time bandmate cellist Caroline Lavelle.

Loreena and her musical cohort of collaborators are flawlessly captured on this new album – a recording which reflects the deep affection and sense of community these festivals foster in performers and attendees alike. The early songs, the local musicians, the bursts of energy and spontaneity in those performances are what inspired The Road Back Home, which will soon to be on offer to a global audience.