Zeroing in on the fact they're fused into one of Canada's musical royal families is probably a disservice. But Kate and Anna McGarrigle seem to perpetuate their story with such sparkly connections.

McGarrigle news is often strung along a web of links to Nick Cave sessions and recordings with Emmylou Harris, the beautifully grey-haired Queen Guest Star of them all. Or we hear of Kate's son, Rufus Wainwright, whom she spawned with her ex, Louden Wainwright III, in the first age of bell bottoms. But the two belle soeurs return apart from all that tomorrow night at Festival Place in Sherwood Park, part of a very small tour on the way to Yellowknife, worth perhaps even a very long bicycle ride through the cold from E-ville.

Born two years after her sister Anna in 1946, Kate McGarrigle is an absolute riot, like a worldly auntie you have a secret crush on as a kid. Kate is the kind of person you want to be if you live for a while, fickle with subject matter and confidently creative, evidenced by her work on The McGarrigle Hour a couple years back, or in ghostly duets with Anna on Cave's No More Shall We Part.

She launches into the fact she and Anna have expanded their little black book to include one of Andy Warhol's old catches. "We're going to be on Lou Reed's new album," McGarrigle says, sounding happy about the prospect. "It's really out there. He's doing an Edgar Allen Poe album. I hadn't met him before. We were jumping around singing and everyone was looking at us like we were nuts! But it took us out of the usual thing in Montreal in the studio here."

McGarrigle is throwing coffee bags to her daughter when I reach her in Montreal, and there's something sassy and wholesome about the scene.

In an attempt to capture the whole picture for a book, the McGarrigles have put out the call for any and all shots of them over the years. Well, they didn't exactly do it ... "It's my brother in law, curse him! Anna went into a severe depression last year when we went through all these photos we had. When we were 19 and 20 years old we had a lot of photographers around, when we were just girls, not posed walking through the woods like now or anything. The pictures start around then. I have no pictures of me as a child."

I ask her if time lost bugs her, too. If the pictures sparked something. "It doesn't get to me, no. It's like, here you are, two years old at this fair, but it's not stuff you remember, anyway. I think what really provokes memories is smell more than anything. You smell this stew and BAM! All this rush of things comes back!"

But Kate has her memories, with or without the photos or broth. "We were in this village, Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts. My father decided to send us to school. My father was born in 1899 and my mother was born in 1904. They had us very late in life. He was Irish from St. John's. His judgment was very different from other people. He put us into a French school and we were still learning it, so we really glommed onto music, even at four and five years old. It was like a place where we could feel accepted. We were, I'm not going to say 'better' than the other kids, but we stuck out. My parents came from a generation where people didn't play records, they got up and sang songs. It was Gershwin, songs from the First World War. There was a group of nuns who taught piano and very few people took advantage of this. 'This is like gold,' we thought. They were very good teachers, they headed up the music department at the University of Montreal, real pros.

"We did well; that gave us the confidence, even if we couldn't speak the language. Because above anything else, you try and find a way to be noticed.

"Not that any of us became classical masters," she laughs. No, but masters nonetheless. Come and see!