Loreena McKennitt. Photo by Richard Haughton

Loreena McKennitt has sold more than 14 million albums since releasing her debut, “Elemental,” in 1985. Along the way, she’s earned critical acclaim across the globe as well as gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards in 15 countries, including Canada, the United States, Australia and Spain.

She and her band will perform the 1991 album “The Visit,” along with an opening set of career-spanning selections, during a show Wednesday at Merrill Auditorium.

McKennitt’s music is a thoughtfully crafted fusion of pop, folk and worldbeat that’s often referred to as “eclectic Celtic.” At the center of it are her crystal-clear soprano vocals. McKennitt also plays piano, harp and accordion.

In a Zoom conversation from her home in Stratford, Ontario, McKennitt talked about incorporating poetry into her music, time periods she’d like to visit and what she does to keep her voice strong.

All these years later, what’s your relationship like with the songs on “The Visit?”

In some cases they’ve kind of expanded. I think of a piece like ‘The Old Ways,” when I was writing that and ruminating on certain traditions and things that seem to be slipping away in rural Ireland. We’ve seen a loss of traditions and rituals, and people making music together, dancing together, certain ways of being together because we’re now infected so much with the technology, and we’ve become more spectators than participants.

With some of your music, you find these ancient poems and stories, and you set them to music and create songs around them. Is that a good way of describing it?

There’s no question that I’ve located certain pieces of literature, poetry in particular. The W.B. Yeats poem “The Stolen Child” or “The Lady of Shalott” by Tennyson or Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman.” There’s some Shakespeare in there, too. I felt that my lyric writing is not the strongest thing that I do, so when I go to recording I always like to weave in at least one poem or something by someone much more sophisticated even if they are dead. But the sentiment of the song fits within the family of songs that are hinged under this title of the recording. And it has to connect in some way to do with history and to the Celts in some broad sense.

You discover a piece of poetry. Then what happens?

It’s kind of like divining. I go off on different exploratory journeys. Is it a minor key? A major key? Does it feel like this or that? Then I finally settle on something.

Where you would have a time machine bring you to?

In terms of richness of culture, I’d have to say one period of time would be in the Ottoman Empire. There is such a richness of traditions and customs and foods, architecture, agriculture. But I would (also) find it immensely interesting to go back to some of the earliest period of the Celts because their culture has certain strands of commonality with Indigenous people in North America. I’m deeply interested in that kind of period of time. Another period of time would be prior to the industrial revolution, before all hell broke out.

Do you wonder what the musical record will be of this time years from now?

Not just the musical record, the record of anything because I think there are many unintended negative consequences of this digital age. I fear that it’s going to be a black hole. When one thinks that going from tablets to papyrus to the various means that we’ve been able to follow along with history, this will be just a disaster of an era. And not only from that standpoint but when I think when one is talking about traditional music. Music was, of course, conceived in a time when there wasn’t this kind of technology, when there wasn’t radio or television much less what we have now. It was community. It was about being together as a community and making music together as a community, and it was marking the seasons. All these festivals and traditions often had music and dance that went with them. I’ve always loved those things, and it concerns me the potential loss of this and what we’ve already lost.

What’s next after this tour wraps up?

This is a tricky thing. A handful of years ago, I went to Rajasthan in India to research the connection, the history of the Celts in what we now refer to as India, and it was an amazingly rich research trip. The problem is that part of the music industry is broken. The music that I make with all these eclectic and exotic instruments, and finding musicians who play them really at the top of their game, is a very expensive kind of musical footprint.  It was one thing in the day when artists such as myself would be paid 25 cents per song on a vinyl or CD but now we get paid 10 cents per 1,000 plays on Spotify or YouTube. So there’s not a predictable, viable business model to go and make music. The audience is there, the will is there, but the business model is not there. There’s a real appetite for it, it’s just the middle people, the Spotifys who, like many of the other tech companies, have unrolled a very predatory kind of business model where they run at loss leaders, they might try to take over a landscape, kill the competition and then maybe start to make profit themselves. I think that sadly the legislation and the regulation hasn’t been able to keep up. The creative class is being destroyed. The music industry is just the beginning of it.

Your vocals are still incredible. How do you do it?

I think there are two things. One is that I studied classical music when I was a teenager, so I learned how to protect my voice and also how to use it in different colors and textures. Secondly is that I’m very aware that my ability to sing well has to do with the amount of sleep I get and that I’m physically fit, so I run. When we go on tour, I go for a half-hour run in the afternoon just leading up to sound check. I think touring is more an athletic event than it is an artistic one. The classical training, the sleep and the exercise are critical.

Loreena McKennitt
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 11. Merrill Auditorium, 20 Myrtle St., Portland, $65.50. porttix.com