Maggie & Terre Roche’s 1975 LP Is a Revelation. Why Is It Forgotten?

“It’s funny how one always wants to play their favorite records for friends, and they never listen properly, never understand them,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1943. Many of us have albums like that, orphaned ones we shyly push on others to little or no avail. We blink back tears while playing the tracks; they wish to flee the room.

Primary among these, for me, is Maggie & Terre Roche’s little-known 1975 album “Seductive Reasoning.” It appeared 50 years ago this month, which seems like an occasion to speak up about it. It’s a misfit of a record, and it fizzled commercially: People lined up not to buy copies.

“Seductive Reasoning” was such a non-hit that it drove Maggie and Terre, sisters from Park Ridge, N.J., out of the music business — at least until 1979, when they emerged with their younger sister, Suzzy, as the Roches and released their eponymously titled first LP to ecstatic reviews. That album, “The Roches,” deserves its reputation. If you don’t know “Hammond Song,” well, your homework, and a portable slice of bliss, awaits you.

Nothing the three Roche sisters did together, for me, tops the sparer and earthier and wilier (it’s a little stupid on purpose) pleasures of “Seductive Reasoning.” It’s been in the shadows for too long.

“Seductive Reasoning” is a young person’s record, a product of overlapping propinquities, made by a college dropout (Maggie) and a high school dropout (Terre) who possessed swooping blood harmonies, a novelistic deftness with language and a whole raft of intense perceptions and inchoate longings to draw upon.