"If one can trust [one's] instincts, feel equipped for the unpredictable," says Loreena McKennitt, "it sometimes can lead to some very interesting places."

McKennitt's talking about the creation of her music, in particular her most recent album, The Book of Secrets. But she could just as easily be referring to the journey of her current hit single, "The Mummers' Dance," which has landed its forty-something creator on the top 40 and alternative charts - "very interesting places" indeed for an established Celtic-leaning New Age diva.

Actually, the Canadian singer-songwriter, who is self-managed, self-produced, and runs her own record label, reportedly abhors the New Age tag. (Billboard magazine, which formerly classified McKennitt as New Age, now lists her albums, along with those of most other Celtic artists, on its world music chart). Nevertheless, it is out of the ordinary, maybe even unprecedented, for a performer like McKennitt - whose audience consists largely of the National Public Radio crowd - to have an alternative hit.

Of course, "The Mummers' Dance" wouldn't have been pushed to modern rock radio in the first place were it not for the rocked-up, electronic-washed remix by Nick Batt of U.K. slice'n'dice outfit DNA. While some observers lament the techno changes wrought by Batt (who did something similar to Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" several years ago), others are pleased that it enabled the hauntingly lovely song to get crossover airplay. There really is nothing else on the radio quite like "The Mummers' Dance;" its lilting minor key melody, swirling rhythms, and McKennitt's Enya-with-cojones voice are instantly ear-catching. Where alternative radio has been rife with female voices warbling things like, "I'm a bitch, I'm a lover," and "I've been a bad, bad girl," it's downright novel to hear lines like "A garland gay we bring you here/And at your door we stand/It is a sprout well budded out/The work of Our Lord's hand."

Mummers, in case you were wondering, date back to the time of the Druids in Western Europe. "Mumming usually involves a group of performers dressing up in masks (sometimes of straw) and clothes bedecked with ribbons or rags, and setting out on a procession to neighboring homes singing songs and carrying branches of greenery," McKennitt observes in the liner notes to The Book of Secrets. She goes to cite parallels between mumming in England, where the practice originated, to folk traditions in Ireland, Italy, even Turkey and Greece.

McKennitt, an enthusiastic traveler, has been wandering multicultural paths for some time. She was born of mostly Irish stock in rural Manitoba - although, as she notes, "there was very little overt 'Celticness' to my upbringing in the sense of music or storytelling." Finally exposed to Celtic music in a Winnipeg folk club, she began pursuing a musical career in Stratford, Ontario, where she continues to live. McKennitt formed her label Quinlan Road in 1985, released a nine-song cassette called Elemental, and began selling it from her car. Two albums later at a Celtic exhibition in Venice, Italy, McKennitt discovered that Celtic roots stretched as far afield as Spain, Hungary, Ukraine, and Asia Minor. From that point on, she incorporated all manner of exotic influences and instruments into her musical mix. Her next album, 1992's The Visit, was her first in partnership with Warner Bros. Records.

The Book of Secrets was recorded in Wiltshire, England, at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios. "All kinds of different projects were being worked on," she says. "At suppertime, for example, I could be sitting next to the engineer of Massive Attack, or the producer of Black Grape..."

Little did she know that not too long afterward, McKennitt would be rubbing shoulders, in a more figurative yet even more surprising way, with Massive Attack's and Black Grape's colleagues on the alternative music charts. But as she might say herself, going to those "very interesting places" comes of being prepared for the unpredictable - and the emphatically self-sufficient artist is nothing if not prepared.

MOIRA McCORMICK