Podcast features topics near and dear to Loreena
In what turned out to be an illuminating half hour, Loreena sat down with Jay Michaels, host of the podcast Opening the Harp Chakra, where they covered a wide range of subjects near and dear to her heart. During the April 28th interview, they discussed her discovery of Celtic music and the soothing, magical appeal of harps (she has five). “I’ve often felt that music is like an aural pharmacy,” she reveals.
They also touch on Loreena’s civic involvements, environmental efforts, and the fight she’s waging against the streaming platforms she believes have destroyed the music industry’s successful business model, replacing it with an inequitable, self-serving model.
She reflects on her early ambitions to become a vet and how she borrowed the money her parents had set aside for veterinary school to record her first album ‘Elemental’, which she later peddled at a market in downtown Toronto. She discusses the rise of her career and how it grew in “a very organic way” as she figured things out for herself, having never had a manager. She emphatically condemns the “bootlegging” of music and describes her alarm at discovering her entire catalogue had been illegally downloaded onto one site, which bragged about the number of people who’d seen it for free in a single week. Calling the digital age and music streaming “the forced march”, she laments the destruction of a once-healthy music industry upended by the music streaming era and its failure to compensate artists in a sustainable way.
“I’ve never been one to suffer quietly,” she admitted, emphasizing, “but I’m just one person around the globe looking at how we can make better choices.”