The Book of Secrets Loreena McKennitt
	1. Prologue 2. The Mummer's Dance 3. Skellig 4. Marco Polo 5. The Highwayman 6. La Serenissima 7. Night Ride Across the Caucasus 8.Dante's Prayer

I'm an Enya fan, have been for quite a while. I like music with a Celtic flair to it (like most of the country I guess). I think it's a genetic thing. A lot of Irish came to this country in the late 1800 -- early 1900's (my great-grandfather among them), and I think most people can trace at least one ancestor back to the Emerald Isle. This genetic thing doesn't explain why I like Andreas Vollenwieder though -- this guy plays music with any instrument he can get his hands on (granted, he does play mostly Harp (including Celtic harps), but if it has strings he can play it). Why do I mention these 2 people before a review of someone else? Because -- if Enya and Vollenwieder were ever to have a child, she would grow up to be Loreena McKennitt.

To furthur confuse matters, Loreena is Canadian (most Irish immigrants who weren't allowed into the US went up to Canada instead) -- but with a name like McKennitt, you know Irish is there somewhere. Like most people, I had never heard of her before the song "The Mummer's Dance" came out. I first caught it while skipping past MTV, and was immediatly intrigued (any video featuring a woman playing an instrument is rare on MTV, especially one playing a non-rock instrument, so it was hard to miss). I waited until the end to see who this person was, although the name didn't ring any bells at all. So I filed it away until looking through CD's at the library, and an older CD titled "The Mask and the Mirror" went past with that same name. 8 songs, 52 minutes of music (that's almost 7 minutes a song). Interesting music, strange lyrics, and even stranger instrumentation (not many people would use Uilleann pipes (traditional Irish instrument), tabla and tamboura (traditional Indian instruments), and electric gutiars in the same song).

So, enough rambling about unusual instruments and the like -- how is the tape? Very different, in a good way of course. The version of Mummer's Dance on the tape is the original version, not the dance remix so popular on MTV and top 40 stations, but it's not far from it (about the biggest difference is the absence of a conventional drum kit -- either way, it hits the subwoofer pretty good). And the 6 minute length seems to go by pretty quick as well. The long song prize goes to "The Highwayman" -- yes, the same The Highwayman you might have read in high school, I know I did anyway. Let's just say I enjoyed Loreena's version a lot more than the Huffman reader version. It's all very mysterious and foriegn, and well worth a listen or two.