Loreena McKennitt has announced The Mask and Mirror Live, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of an in-concert recording of Loreena McKennitt’s then newly-released fifth studio album The Mask and Mirror.
The Mask and Mirror Live will be released in three formats including digital, 180g vinyl, and a CD edition that contains two additional bonus tracks.
This live recording was captured at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco on May 19, 1994 for radio syndication throughout the US and Canada.
Five of the songs from The Mask and Mirror that were performed that night are released here for the first time and all but three of the tracks included in the CD edition are previously unreleased.
The Mask and Mirror Live includes many staples of the McKennitt canon including “The Mystic’s Dream,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Marrakesh Night Market,” and “The Two Trees.”
Original 1994 promotional CDs featuring the complete radio broadcast from that night soon became sought-after items among collectors of Loreena rarities.
By the late spring of 1994 Loreena McKennitt was already on her way to cementing a commercial breakthrough across four continents for her then recently released recording, The Mask and Mirror. The album earned Platinum sales awards in Canada, Australia, Italy and the United States plus Gold awards in Spain, France, Argentina and Germany. New audiences for Loreena’s music were also seeded in musical cultures as diverse as those of Greece, Turkey, Scandinavia, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile.
The Mask and Mirror went on to sell more than one million copies in the US and more than two million worldwide.
McKennitt’s last release was The Road Back Home, which arrived last month.
The album was recorded in the summer of 2023 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.
Pre-order The Mask and Mirror Live.