Pop music has had its share of notable mothers — they range from Kristin Hersh (who cut the first Throwing Muses album while eight months pregnant) to the guys in Frank Zappa’s band. But if ever a songwriter sounded like a happily married mother of four from the Boston suburbs, Lori McKenna sure isn’t it. Listen to her new CD Pieces of Me (on the newly formed Catalyst label) and you’d probably think it came from some dusty shack in Appalachia — thanks in part to the mountain accents in her singing and the rustic feel of the mostly acoustic back-ups. Both her tunes and her singing have that high lonesome feel of rural folk music, and even the love songs convey the touch of world-weary resignation that comes from being miles from nowhere.

None of the above is evident when we meet at Cambridge’s 1369 Coffeehouse. It’s the middle of a weekday, and as usual, she’s busy: her kids need to be rounded up from school and day care (the youngest was born only last August). This isn’t the type of lifestyle that lends itself to a successful recording and songwriting career, but she has no complaints: "I’m the youngest of six myself, so this is the way I grew up. Having the [most recent] baby made me officially lose the day job I’d been hanging onto, so now I can concentrate on just the kids and the shows. So it’s working great, but that could be because I’m not sleeping."

McKenna doesn’t seem to mind that family life tends to be the first thing people ask about. "It’s such a big part of me and I always mention it at shows; if I didn’t, people wouldn’t know me at all. I do remember one show where I tried to keep the kids out of my between-song banter; so of course someone yelled out, ‘How are the kids?’ "

Although she’s been performing for only the past few years, she’s been writing songs for much longer. On the new disc’s title track she notes, "I have been a poet all my life, with really not too much to say." Call her the Gillian Welch or the Julie Miller of Boston, one whose music seems to spring from a different time and place. McKenna’s purist sound makes her an anomaly among Boston’s female singer-songwriters, most of whom gravitate to other styles — whether it’s jazz (Erin McKeown), elegant pop (Jennifer Kimball), or rock (practically everyone else, especially Meghan Toohey and Melissa Ferrick). She says she’s a rock fan (and a friend of Toohey’s, who guests on her disc), but she knows her musical strengths lie elsewhere. "I get excited watching someone like Jess Klein, who’s a real star with her band, but I’m not sure I could pull that off. The only explanation for the way I sing is that I never planned on making it a career, so I was never trained and never thought about how it came out."

The disc’s opener, "Mars," is the closest she comes to writing a happy motherhood song, though there’s a melancholy undertone here as well. She returns often to the theme of distance within close relationships; on "Never Die Young" she writes movingly about her mother’s death. Although this happened when she was six, she says it’s been an influence ever since. "It’s affected me all my life, and it’s where that broken-hearted, missing-someone feeling comes from. People who write songs usually have love relationships that have been there and gone, and that’s something I didn’t go through — I got married when I was 19, and it’s been 14 years. But missing my mother has filled in for that lost-love kind of heartache. Along with knowing that you can be in a house with five people and still be lonely sometimes."

MOTHERHOOD CAUGHT UP WITH MARY LOU LORD around the time she released her major-label debut, 1998’s Got No Shadow (WORK/Columbia). This led to a conscious career redirection. "The record had only been out a couple of months when I got pregnant," she explains from her home in Salem, "and that’s not exactly a record company’s favorite thing. They had a formula where you tour for a year, and I bailed. I let them put me on the Lilith tour, and that was it." Her daughter Annabelle was born around at the end of 1998 (and has since become the subject of a song by husband Kevin Patey’s band the Raging Teens). As it turns out, the WORK label went belly-up soon after Lord made her decision. Annabelle, on the other hand, is doing just fine.

Lord has been back in the indie world since Got No Shadow, and she’s just played her ace in the hole: her new City Sounds (Rubric) is a live album recorded at Harvard Square and Park Street Station, the two busking haunts where she originally built her large grassroots fan base. More than a few commuters have been rescued from work drudgery by Lord over the years. But unlike her actual MBTA performances, the disc doesn’t feature the sound of a subway train every few minutes. She was patched straight to DAT, so the sound is remarkably clean. "On a lot of the songs where it sounds warm and clean and up front, there were actually moments where the train was blasting into both of my ears and I could barely hear myself. People may think they [the subway gigs] are a shtick, but they’re not. They’ve kept me alive for 14 years and kept me from having to work as a waitress."

Self-depreciation aside, the disc shows Lord as a gifted interpreter who is able to personalize songs that are either so complex or so closely identified with other singers that they’re far from easy to make one’s own. "Thunder Road" is the surprise highlight: Lord’s treatment is less epic and more intimate than Springsteen’s, giving a warmer slant to the relationship that’s central to the song — the salient line "You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re all right" comes off as more endearing in Lord’s version than it does in the original. She also connects with writers as idiosyncratic as Shane MacGowan and Stephin Merritt, though she gives herself little credit for pulling that off. "People may think I sang them well, but what they’re really hearing is what a great song it is. Anyone who sings ‘Thunder Road’ is bound to do it well if they’ve got an emotional bone in their body." (It’s clear Lord hasn’t heard her share of suburban Springsteen cover bands.)

She’s now planning a long-overdue studio follow-up, working with long-time collaborator Nick Salamon of the Bevis Frond and a Seattle pop band she’s lately been enamored with, the Green Pajamas. But she admits that she feels most as home when she’s busking. "I play in the street so much that when I’m in the studio, I’m always thinking, ‘Where’s my encore and where’s my tip?’ "

RAMONA SILVER has managed to have kids between each pair of albums: her first son was born soon after 1995’s You & Me & Hell, the second after 1998’s Ultrasound (both on Fingerprint). This accounts for her long disappearances between releases, and for the notably different sound of each. The first disc was raw and punkish, the second a more experimental collection of homemade pop. Her just-released third album, Death by Candy (also on Fingerprint), combines the loud guitar sound of the first album with the textured hooks of the second — it splits the difference between well-crafted melodies and wild exuberance, feasting on the best of both worlds.

"That’s the hormones kicking in again," she notes from her North Shore home. Explaining her breaks from performing, she says that "Boston is a great town for supporting artists, but there’s the outside world as well. I’d hit a peak and I needed to regroup. I was basically getting tired and needing a break. I have to want to do this more than anything in the world, and I had to wait a little while for that feeling to regenerate."

Like the last disc, the new one was largely recorded at home, with Silver and her husband, guitarist Danny Horrid, running downstairs to their basement studio whenever a song idea struck. And her home life works itself into the mix. On the last album, she let her infant son co-write a song; this time he contributes a backing vocal. "We were doing the song ‘Renter’s Hell,’ and I sang that line about ‘shaking generations upside down.’ He yelled that line down the stairs as I was singing, and it sounded perfect, so it made it into the final mix." And since the song is about the soaring rental fees in Somerville, where families wind up crowded into the same room, it seemed like an appropriate coincidence, a case of synchronicity at work.

Another thing that comes through loud and clear on the new album is Silver’s ambivalence about being in the rock biz. The new disc opens with "Hang My Head" (an implied fuck-you song about the efforts one has to make to woo a lover or an audience) and closes with "Halo" (about the lure of local nightlife, specifically in Central Square). In keeping with the mood of the latter song, she plans to be visible in the months to come, starting with a Tuesday-night residency at Toad through February. "I want to do plenty more albums. Not sure about doing the kid thing again, though."