Forgive George Millar if he was feeling a wee bit schizophrenic last year while he was writing songs for two Irish Rover albums.

One of the albums, "Merry Merry Time of Year," is a Christmas album and the other, "Drunken Sailor," which is being released this month, is largely a collection of bawdy seafaring tales.

"One day I was writing about sailors getting drunk onshore and betting on the whores and the hounds," Millar says during a telephone interview from his home on Vancouver Island, "and the next day I was writing about Jesus and the baby in the manger.

"It was one hand with a glass of wine and one hand with a glass of milk. And I wasn't quite sure which way I was going some of the time."

Millar and his five compatriots in the Irish Rovers (Wilcil McDowell, John Reynolds, Sean O'Driscoll, Ian Millar and Fred Graham) likely will have their hands on the wine when they perform Saturday night at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg.

The band -- which got its start in 1963 when George Millar and the late Jim Ferguson, who had both emigrated from Northern Ireland to Toronto, started singing together -- will be showcasing songs from its new album.

Millar, says the band members decided to make the album when they were told their version of "Drunken Sailor," a song they've used as a show-closer for decades, had become something of a sensation on YouTube.

"Somebody phoned me and said, 'You know you guys have a million hits on the 'Drunken Sailor?' I said it's probably not us, it's probably Flogging Molly or one of those groups on the East Coast. It couldn't be us. We're old and it's a folk song."

Millar, 64, says one of his grandchildren helped him find YouTube on the computer and, sure enough, it was the Irish Rovers' version of "Drunken Sailor."

Millar and his bandmates decided to capitalize on the song's unexpected popularity by building an album around it.

That sparked Millar, a prolific songwriter who has provided the band with its original material since its inception, to start writing songs with a nautical theme, along with those Christmas songs.

Millar, who lives on Vancouver Island, which is in British Columbia, Canada, says he has a view of the Pacific Ocean from his house. The view gives him inspiration but also can be a distraction.

"You can spend two hours looking out because, when you're on the ocean, it's ever-changing," he says. "It's a restless thing. It's not like a lake. There's always something happening out there We've got these huge picture windows and it's hard to get your eyes off it."

Among the songs Millar wrote for the album was one called "The Titanic."

It's a fitting subject for a number of reasons: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking; Millar shares his birthday (April 14) with the day the ship hit the iceberg that sank it; and the Titanic was built in Belfast, Ireland, where the Irish Rovers recorded "Drunken Sailor."

"It almost destroyed all of the shipyards (in Belfast)," Millar says of the Titanic's sinking, "and the people were in a great funk for an awful long time because of it. They say she was OK when she left here; there wasn't a scratch on her. It wasn't the builder's fault."

Though the Irish Rovers, all of whom hail from Ireland, seem like they could go on forever, Millar says he and McDowell, the other founding member still in the band, are planning their retirements.

"We are going to tour until 2015, which is going to be 50 years of the Irish Rovers, and then we're going to retire from the road," he says. "We're not going to retire the name. We'll do the odd CD and we'll do some special shows.

"After two years, if we're bored, we'll be like Cher and we'll do another farewell tour."

Irish Rovers

Sat. 7:30 p.m. $27.50, $39.50

Sunoco Performance Theater

Whitaker Center

222 Market St., Harrisburg

214-ARTS. www.whitakercenter.org