Loreena McKennitt’s live album, The Road Back Home, nominated for traditional roots album of the year at the 2025 Junos

Stratford musician-singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt.

Stratford musician-singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt and Stratford based Celtic band The Bookends are being recognized on the national stage for an album that came about as almost an afterthought during a tour of four Ontario summer music festivals nearly two years ago.

McKennitt’s album, The Road Back Home, was released in March 2024 and was recorded during the summer of 2023 when she performed with The Bookends and her longtime cellist, Caroline Lavelle, at four folk festivals in southern Ontario: The Goderich Celtic Roots Festival, Summerfolk Music Festival, Muskoka Music Festival and the Peterborough Folk Festival. Now, that album has been nominated for a 2025 Juno Award for traditional roots album of the year.

“It was actually a second thought in many respects because … I had been invited to perform at some of these folk festivals in southern Ontario over the years and hadn’t been able to for one reason or another,” McKennitt said. “I saw that summer two years ago coming up and I said to The Bookends, ‘What do you think about working out 60 minutes of material and doing these festivals with me?’ So, we did, but leading up to them I said, ‘Maybe we should record them at least for posterity, but maybe it can be a recording.’

“So, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I want to make a traditional recording.’ It was really more let’s go and perform, and by the way, let’s record it.”

The 10-song album represents a return to McKennitt’s roots to where her passion for Celtic and folk music began. It includes many songs that date back to her earliest days on the folk circuit, some of which had remained unrecorded until this album.

The Road Back Home is meant as an homage to what feels like simpler times, offering comfort and familiarity. It’s like going home, McKennitt explained. The early songs, the local musicians, the bursts of energy and spontaneity in those folk performances are what inspired the album that has now been Juno nominated. It also manages to capture the deep affection, sense of community and electric energy these types of events foster in the hearts of performers and folk festival devotees alike.

“It’s a compilation of the best tracks of each of those performances. It’s traditional material; some are pieces that I learned when I was back in Winnipeg in the late ‘70s where I first got introduced to Celtic music. The pieces that are the instrumentals are ones The Bookends had worked up on their own. … It was great to be able to go back to the beginning. It’s just so fantastic to have The bookends here because if they weren’t here, I don’t think I’d have been able to do it.

“ … There’s an interesting thing about performing in front of a live audience as opposed to recording in a studio. The studio, sometimes, you work things over too much. With live performances, there’s that spontaneous interaction with the audience that makes it unique and quite an electrifying experience. And you’re in a vulnerable kind of way when you’re performing and recording because you don’t know if there will be mistakes or somebody will forget the lyrics like me. So, there is something very special about live recordings.”

The Road Back Home was released on CD and 180g vinyl, and via digital music services including those offering Dolby Atmos.

This is the fourth Juno nomination for McKennitt. She was a nominee in 2008 for music DVD of the year for Nights from the Alhambra. In 1994, she won the Juno Award for best roots/traditional album for The Mask and Mirror and, in 1992, she took home the Juno for best roots/traditional album for The Visit.

The 54th annual Juno Awards will be broadcast from Rogers Arena in Vancouver on March 30. McKennitt said she plans to attend the awards ceremony in person.