Keeping Time With the McGarrigle Sisters

“Who knows where the time goes?” sighs the refrain of an old Sandy Denny/Fairport Convention ballad that is one of the all-time highlights of folk-rock.

For Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the Canadian sisters who have sung some enduring folk-based pop songs of their own over the past 20 years, the answer seems to be: in circles.

Having passed 50, the McGarrigles, who play Sunday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano (also Saturday and Monday at the Ash Grove in Santa Monica), open their new album, “Matapedia,” with two songs about metaphysically recapturing their youth.

In “Goin’ Back to Harlan,” Anna, at 52, revisits the old Appalachian folk tunes that enthralled her as a teenager and is transported back to her youth and the first bloom of love. (Emmylou Harris did a version of the song on her album “Wrecking Ball.”)

Kate, 51, sings in “Matapedia” of having 30 years stripped from her in an instant--in the metaphysical sense--when an old flame encounters her daughter, Martha, and for a striking moment thinks that she is his long-ago lover, unchanged. In the song, the episode rekindles Kate’s memory of what it was like to be 22, rushing with her beau in a car along the banks of Quebec’s Matapedia River, embracing all the experience yet to come that would bring her, eventually, back to the song’s present.

*

The man in the song “was a teacher in [Martha’s] college. He grabbed her in the hall and thought it was me for one brief second, and then he got all apologetic,” Kate McGarrigle said Tuesday by phone from a tour-stop hotel room in San Francisco. “I guess 30 years of time flips away there, and then you’re all shocked and embarrassed. In your own self, you forget, and you’re still the same, even though the exterior [self] has changed.

“I was sitting around the house one day and picked up the guitar, and for some reason that incident kept on ringing through my head,” she said. “It brought back a bunch of very pleasant memories.”

Time may well be circling evocatively once again for the McGarrigles in the coming days. Kate’s son, Rufus Wainwright, 23, is about to launch his own recording career, and they plan to join him in a Los Angeles studio on Tuesday to add their voices to his debut album for DreamWorks Records. Enhancing the circularity of the experience is the fact that Wainwright--a product, like Martha, of Kate’s marriage during the 1970s to the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III--was signed by the same executive, Lenny Waronker, who signed the McGarrigle sisters to their first recording contract.

When it comes to the pace of their own recording career, Kate and Anna may identify with the wistfulness of that old Fairport refrain. “Matapedia,” their seventh album in a career dating back 20 years, is the first new McGarrigles release since 1990, and just the second since 1983.

“We’re speeding up,” Kate said wryly, noting that this time it took them six years, not seven.

*

Business setbacks and entanglements and related timing problems were the main causes of the wait, Kate said, not writers’ block. (The McGarrigles work both separately and together in composing songs, sometimes bringing in other collaborators.) In fact, over the past few years the sisters composed 16 songs for a never-produced musical about Cassie Chadwick, “a woman who made a lot of money in the 1880s and 1890s by claiming she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.” Business complications and artistic differences with the producer scuttled the work, Kate said, and the McGarrigles earned just $2,000 for their labors.

Now, in another circular touch, “Matapedia” has emerged on Hannibal Records, run by Joe Boyd, who co-produced their 1976 debut album.

On the new album, the old-time folksiness of the McGarrigles’ sound is in the foreground once more, carried by fiddles and accordions. Their 1990 release, “Heartbeats Accelerating,” produced by a Daniel Lanois associate, Pierre Marchand, was based in their ‘80s experimentation with synthesizers and studio electronics.

Kate is glad to be back in the woods, so to speak. “We had very little to say, production-wise, on [“Heartbeats”]. It exhausted us. For almost two years after that I didn’t want to go into the studio. It was done note by note, and we hated the process. But now that I listen in retrospect, it had a kind of integrity, a wholeness. It’s something that we would never have done on our own.”

The songs on “Heartbeats Accelerating” were close-up portraits of people living with loneliness. “Matapedia” is much broader in scope, with a sweep that moves from the present to deep in the past, from the sisters’ own romantic girlhood to the recent death of their French-Canadian mother, Gaby, at 91. It includes “Why Must We Die?” which turns from a stricken meditation on mortality into an oddly hopeful and comforting anthem. There’s also a song of great historical sweep: “Jacques Et Gilles” tells of the social resistance French-Canadian migrant workers encountered when they flocked to jobs in New England mills during the 19th and early 20th century, aiming to earn money and return home rather than join unions and assimilate into the community. The parallels to present-day California are obvious.

Moving through middle age could have something to do with those widening songwriting horizons, Kate said. “I’ve started to wear reading glasses in the last couple of years. As you get older, you can’t see up close, but you can see farther away better.”

The McGarrigles never have had a far-reaching vision for their career, Kate said. It began, as she put it, “by accident” when Linda Ronstadt got a hold of a song Anna had written, “Heart Like a Wheel,” which became the title track of the album that secured Ronstadt’s stardom. (To this day, the McGarrigles aren’t sure whether Ronstadt got it from Jerry Jeff Walker, who heard Kate perform it during an early-’70s sojourn in New York City and offered to get a copy to Ronstadt, or from a 1972 version recorded by the rock band, McKendree Spring.)

By the time their debut album emerged, the McGarrigles were both in their 30s and more inclined to be true to the old-fashioned idiosyncrasy in their tremulous, closely harmonizing voices than to the polished Eagles-Ronstadt soft-rock sound that was popular at the time.

“Maybe we didn’t become stars because of that attitude,” Kate said. “We weren’t emulating anybody.”

Cult-dom, rather than stardom, has resulted in limited annual touring in the British Isles, Canada, and the Northeast, and to a less-than-lavish lifestyle. But Kate, who shares a home in Montreal with her acting-student daughter, is willing to accept such inconveniences as nursing her overtaxed, 8-year-old Ford Taurus through one more Canadian winter, bundling up when she drives because the heater won’t work and, after 300,000 miles, she can’t see any point in sinking more money into it.

She says that she and Anna, who lives 60 miles outside of Montreal in a rural village with her journalist husband and teenage son and daughter, talk “four times a day, but it’s not all necessarily about music. We’re best friends. The friends we have now are people we knew before we were in the business. We tend to hang out with them more than people in the music industry.”

It sounds like a life well-suited to contemplating where the time goes, and turning up every half decade or so with answers and observations worth hearing.

* Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Kit Smith and Roger Kraft play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50-$20.50. (714) 496-8930.