If You Must, Label Her ‘Enlightened’ : Pop music: Loreena McKennitt, who performs in Irvine tonight, sings ethereal material, but don’t pigeonhole the harpist as New Age.

Unicorns, swans and mythical critters grace one of her album covers. On another she is photographed in suffused light standing by an ancient arch, her tresses looking as if she’d lost a hair-mussing contest with Stevie Nicks. She plays Celtic harp and sings in a Celtic manner, in echoey, ethereal, atmospheric settings. Her songs list such heady and significantly dead co-writers as St. John of the Cross and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

This is Loreena McKennitt, and, despite one’s worst apprehensions given the above information, she’s not the least bit precious or pretentious.

McKennitt’s music may be a popular impulse buy at health-food store checkout stands, but it is far more than the standard New Age bathwater. Rather, this is the sort of stuff Ophelia might float downstream to, music full of somber depths, spiritual longings and age-old echoes.

At the same time, it is music savvy enough to be embraced by adult alternative radio, the Disney folks--who have a McKennitt song prominent in their hit Tim Allen vehicle “The Santa Clause”--and network TV, where her music has popped up on “Northern Exposure.”

Her current “The Mask and Mirror” and 1991 “The Visit” albums have each sold more than 700,000 copies, and she has been selling out concert halls in her native Canada and the United States on a tour that brings her to the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight.

There are indeed New Age fans in her audiences, she says, “along with classical-music fans, Gothic fans, heavy-metal fans, professors of archeology, music therapists. It’s a very diverse group, no matter how you cut it. It’s not uncommon to have people from three generations coming to the concerts. Monks have come to the shows, and the music has attracted interest from publications representing Hindu, Sufi, Jewish and other persuasions,” McKennitt said.

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Reached by phone at a “very wintry” tour stop in Quebec City, McKennitt said she’d be happier if her music didn’t have to be labeled.

“I feel there are a lot of things going on in my music that cross cultural boundaries and musical styles, so it’s very difficult to label,” she said. “I realize it sometimes becomes a necessary evil in terms of giving the uninitiated some point of reference to become perhaps interested in your music.

“But I have a bit more difficulty with the New Age label than some other categories, if I have to suffer under them. Relegating it there does it a disservice because I feel that New Age music, or at least how it is perceived, is a mood music, where its whole psychological structure is such that it doesn’t really have a passionate focus, whereas I feel there’s a lot more grit and focus to my music.

“Certainly there are people who do put my music on while they have a bath or are doing the laundry, but there are also those who sit down and really focus on the musical arrangements and the themes.”

Her arrangements of late have been stepping far afield from her initial Irish inspirations. “The Mask and Mirror” incorporates a number of southern European and Middle Eastern elements, the result of visits she’s made to Spain and Morocco.

Her songs sometimes are adapted directly from poems by Yeats, Shakespeare or 15th-Century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. Those and her own lyrics are accompanied on her CD sleeves with diary-entry-like liner notes outlining the spiritual studies and musings that led to each song.

Because her music contains a spiritual questing, she feels, it addresses a longing in listeners. It is that same longing that is leading them to explore old religions and discarded ways.

“This grand age of science and the market, from my very amateur explorations and reflections, has allowed us to travel and be less accountable to each other in certain ways, yet it has stolen focus and shifted the emphasis on to science and technology,” she said. “And there has been a lot less emphasis on ourselves as a species and our basic needs. I think that as a species we have a need to be spiritually engaged.

“I think what we are seeing in many of these movements, whether it is the whole pagan-wiccan thing or even in the extreme Christian right, is that people are feeling our contemporary structure is not serving our basic needs as a species, and we’re all floundering about trying to find some anchor in it all.”

McKennitt counts herself among that floundering number, though she’s found that some fans expect her to be plugged into the mysteries of life.

“I wish, in many respects, I had never used my name with my music,” she said. “I don’t feel the me is all that important in the scheme of things. I feel I’m much more just the vehicle than the end. And I do find from time to time that people who meet or write you have projected on to you something much greater than you are. And I’m just trying to make my own way through it.

“For me, the recordings become documents of my own path of exploration. I feel very lucky to have fallen into a way of life where I can marry my curiosities and interests with my skills and talents. But I, too, am stumbling my way through this valley of tears, and it would be very presumptuous of me to say I have any kind of answers.

“The most I feel I can do, as I go through my own quest for enlightenment, is to try to throw spotlights on points of history and other things that have piqued my curiosity and interest and that, in some ways, question or throw context on our historical cultural development. I think what people are connecting with in my music is it is starting to be some modest attempt at addressing our context as humans beings.”

Though her studies range from Celtic myth through Sufi mysticism, the things that work for her aren’t necessarily arcane.

“For me, I just work on a very personal basis,” she said. “I don’t affiliate myself with any religious or political group. I recognize the circumstances in which I feel harmoniously integrated--or whatever you want to call it--and that often just has to do with being outside in the natural world or in the company of family and friends who I enjoy and appreciate.”

McKennitt, 37, grew up in rural Manitoba, the daughter of a cattleman. An intended career as a veterinarian was sidetracked when she got turned on to folk music in the early ‘80s, developing a particular passion for Celtic music. A schooled pianist, she learned to play the Celtic harp and began busking on street corners.

Her recording career began in 1985 with a $10,000 loan from her parents, with which she recorded her first album. She sold her self-produced cassettes at street-side performances, and later in concert halls.

By her third recording, 1989’s “Parallel Dreams,” she was able to sell 30,000 copies through her own company, Quinlan Road--a name inspired by a street she used to live on and the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”--which left her in a good bargaining position when Warner Bros. came calling. Through a licensing agreement, she sees more of a return from her two Warner-distributed albums than most artists get.

Some listeners might expect an artist of McKennitt’s sensitivities to be more at ease communing with unicorns than negotiating with record bigwigs, but she considers that part of being an artist.

“I don’t know that everyone needs to be involved to the degree to which I am,” she said. “I would say that 70% to 80% of my day is spent administrating, and it certainly has infringed on my creative side. But I feel that the compromise has been well worth it, that I’ve been able to bring my creations to their own light of day, and I’ve seen proper compensation for it, unlike many.

“I do believe that however convoluted, distorted and one-sided the music business is--and I rail against it at every opportunity--I think it has got to begin with the artists themselves taking control of their own destinies.

“Artists have bought in to the mythology that they are this very precious, sensitive group of individuals who should not have their hands dirtied by the messy business of business. I think that’s horribly naive.

“Artists have bought in to a view of themselves the way women used to, in that you were too sensitive and too delicate to change a tire or learn to pay a bill, that you were patted on the head and told, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about this.’ And that’s ridiculous. Each one of us has the inclination to enjoy being looked after, but, my God, once you’ve reached voting age and can drive a car, you have to look after yourself.”

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Now that McKennitt has overseen her music’s rise to global success, she’s concerned about not letting the scope of that success work against the music.

“I’ve always been very concerned with scale,” she said. “There is a certain delicacy and intimacy to the music and its subject matter. In some of these very formal concert halls, more geared to the orchestra or the ballet, it becomes much less personable and much harder work to articulate the music.

“I worked in the theater for a time, enough to have had some theatrical disciplines ingrained in me. One is that the larger the venue, the more demanding it becomes to be really focused on what you’re saying--in my case, the music and what I’m singing about. . . . If you’re in the least bit vague or your mind wanders, it’s easy to lose people in a big space.”

So what does a singer think when singing?

“To remain focused on the subject matter of the song,” she said, “I will draw upon a collection of visual images that I will throw before my mind’s eye to be a catalyst to that.”

“They’re not always the same images every night,” she added. “Sometimes they’re just fresh experiences that happened to you in the course of your day--perhaps an encounter with a homeless person, or sometimes I will remember the power of a certain moment, being places such as these 1,000-foot sand dunes in the Moroccan desert at sunrise--that cause you to interpret the music a bit differently, to be a bit more vulnerable and keep the wall of complacency down.”

* Loreena McKennitt sings tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $23.50. (714) 854-4646. Hear Loreena McKennitt: * To hear a sample of the album “The Mask and the Mirror,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5560.

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