Kate & Anna McGarrigle”Kate & Anna McGarrigle”...

Kate & Anna McGarrigle

“Kate & Anna McGarrigle” (1975)

Hannibal

Canada’s McGarrigle sisters were something of an enigma when they breezed onto the pop-music scene in 1975. Were they pop or folk singers? Traditionalists or experimentalists? Sensualists or spiritualists? Feminists or homebodies?

In fact, they were all of the above, and categorizing them couldn’t matter less.

Their roots in Anglo-Franco folk music are quickly apparent, not just from a French-language number like “Complainte Pour Ste Catherine,” but from their use of the diatonic accordion and unexpected harmonies that dress up their catchy tunes. Their lyrics draw from literary sources, the most obvious being the romantic novels of the Bronte sisters, whom they cited on one of their later albums, and whose darker tendencies can be felt in their original version of “Heart Like a Wheel,” which Linda Ronstadt recorded.

Ronstadt’s version, however, left out the bleak second verse, in which the absence of love develops into an all-consuming heartbreak: “They say that death is a tragedy / It comes once and it’s over / But my only wish is for that deep, dark abyss / ‘Cause what’s the use of living with no true lover.”

Such lows are balanced by the highs of their rendition of “Swimming Song” by Loudon Wainwright III (who was then Kate’s husband). Their music hasn’t aged a day in 20 years.