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ut what Boyd didn’t realise as Kate and Anna were signed was that they’d “not thought before that moment of being a duo. They’d never actually gone out and done a gig as Kate & Anna McGarrigle. Kate had the bug and had gone to Saratoga where there was a big folk scene and had busked for a time around 1967 and ’68 in the Portobello Road with Loudon and Chaim Tannenbaum, but Anna had gone to art school. The title song in the collection, Tell My Sister, is about Kate coming home from England to Cana- da having lost a baby. A very sad return. At some point in the late ’60s she got fed up with it and went and did a chemical engineer- ing degree in Montreal. Then she ended up back with Loudon in New York, where she performed country blues with guitar and piano with Roma Baran.”
The sisters’ debut album was recorded in New York with Prestopino and Boyd co-producing and John Wood engineering. Boyd recalls “We all went into the studio, with a bunch of session guys in New York and Chaim Tannenbaum, their old friend from Canada. We took our time, Nick Drake record style, we did a bunch of sessions and sat back and listened to them and thought about what was missing and went out to California and did more ses- sions. There are some tracks that were quite elaborate in their pro- duction but we cut away a lot of chaff as we mixed. Complainte Pour Ste Catherine, the reggae beat and all that, there’s a horn chart on there, we’ve got three different lead guitar players over- dub things at different points and we used little bits of each one; it was quite a ’70s production, people getting used to working with 24 tracks.”
“Kate and I were amazed,” says Anna, “that us two nobodies were given large advances and could hire everybody!”
The record came out in 1975, but by then Kate was pregnant with Martha and couldn’t tour it, so it wasn’t until the following year when it was released in the UK and the McGarrigles came over and toured here that it really took off. Boyd then produced their second album and continued to work with them over the years, putting out records on his label, Hannibal.
The re-mastering has the effect of opening up the sound of the early albums, as Anna points out. “When I heard the re-mas- ters, I could hear everything, there was a transparency, but it was a distraction, I asked Joe to tone it down a bit.” And for Boyd there was joy in discovering new sounds and nuances in the songs. “The technology means you can get a lot more out of an old analogue signal than you could before. That includes a lot of the high end and the clarity and wonderful detail has emerged, certain harmo- ny lines I’d forgotten that suddenly you hear…”
He was worried that the simplicity of the demos would make his earlier productions sound over-blown, but needn’t have been. Tell My Sister sounds wonderfully fresh. As does Odditties, the inti- mate and “long planned compilation of songs they’d recorded between 1973 and 1990”. “Last year,” Anna writes, “Kate and I started to assemble some of our unreleased songs, versions in our possession that had not been available commercially” and none of which appear on the Nonesuch release. “It was in 2008 that Kate started the Querbeservice label, a play on words using her street name Querbes, (s is silent) in lieu of curb, an expression that used to denote fastfood served to your car but now has a more sexual connotation and in this case it’s music served up in your car or wherever you want it. Bon appétit.”
I wonder if Anna is aware of her legacy. Does she think she’s responsible for a particularly Canadian sound, that our editor sug- gests is evident in more recent artists like the Be Good Tanyas, the Abramson Singers or Devon Sproule? She thinks for a minute. “Well, when I’m in the shopping mall, I hear a lot of people that I think sound like us.”
But Boyd would disagree. He thinks the McGarrigle sound is a product of their family singalongs and their unique genetic make up. “The quality of a voice is determined by the overtones, when you both have the same genetic structure to your vocal chords the overtones are very similar and you build up this feedback of over- tones, these layers of overtones, which makes the voices sound very thick. You can’t believe it’s just the two of them singing.” And listening to the wonderful harmonising on Odditties and Tell My Sister, you know he’s right.
www.mcgarrigles.com F
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