superlatives

Tegan and Sara on Their Best and Most Pedestrian Music

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Wendy Redfern/Redferns

They’ve shared a zygote, a womb, a face, a family, a life story, a career, and now, even 25 years into it, Tegan and Sara Quin still sound as urgent as adolescence.

At age 17, while competing at the 1998 Calgary Garage Warz battle of the bands, Tegan announced onstage that if she and her identical twin sister, Sara, didn’t get first place that night, their mom would force them to go to college. They won the bet, forging a career that would become a conduit for connection — not only to their largely queer female fan base, who found one another almost immediately on Tegan and Sara–related internet forums, but to each other. For the past 25 years, their career has acted as their middleman, forcing the siblings to spend time together, while their songs have given them dioramic glimpses into each other’s internal worlds.

Today, Tegan and Sara operate with the same full-throated stakes as they did on that career-or-college night in Calgary. The duo still act as though they have everything to prove, and for the past few years, they’ve been considering their legacy. In 2019, they penned their own origin story with the publication of their memoir, High School, which will be brought to a larger audience on October 14 in Amazon Freevee’s Clea DuVall–directed TV adaptation. A week later, the duo will release their tenth album, Crybaby,  which draws from new sonic palettes and collaborative dynamics. Ahead of both projects, we asked Tegan and Sara to go through the best and worst moments of their career thus far.

Best song

Sara: I think the Tegan and Sara song that would define us, like, if we were suddenly dead —

Tegan: Wow.

Sara: Spiritually or literally dead, I would go with “Walking With a Ghost.” It was really the one that got us cred in places where we hadn’t had any credibility. Take that or leave that. I’m mostly referring to white straight men, but it’s true. It was our first kind of crack at radio and the mainstream. It still sounds so fresh. I know this because I heard it playing in Whole Foods the other day and I was like, This sounds great. I hate to say that’s a high point because it came out so long ago, so are we over? I don’t know.

Tegan: I really agree with all of that. Just because I’m in this band that’s putting out a new album, I’m going to pick something off the new album because I do think this album is really strong; the songwriting is really strong. We just released a song called “Faded Like a Feeling.” Sara and I collaborated on it. I lifted some of her old lyrics. It was made up of an old song which had not been released.

Worst song

Tegan: Yep, I can do this one easy. I get requests constantly to play a song called “Superstar,” and it is a bad song.

Sara: I don’t think it’s a bad song. I wanna say that I totally disagree. I just think that there’s a presentation issue with the song.

Tegan: I know you think that, but I’m the one who just tried to learn it and it’s like, no, it’s worse than presentation. It’s lyrically nonsensical, the melodies are not that strong or good, the arrangement of the song is confusing. That’s the problem with a lot of our first songs. There are parts that are really beautiful, but mostly it’s just like Yahtzee — every section is like, What are we gonna throw out there now?! Here’s a new melody! Sara was the superior songwriter in our early career. Sara’s songs were really melodically developed. There was structure. I was basically still coming down from high-school acid.

Sara: If I had to pick anything, I’d pick any song on This Business of Art where Tegan rapped.

The song that impressed the other the most

Sara: I’m always impressed by songs Tegan sends me. In every batch of songs she sends me for an album, there’ll always be that song which really stands out. I remember hearing “Nineteen” from The Con. At the time, I was dating Emy, our art director for the band, and she’d get up early; she was always working on projects. I remember her listening to a song Tegan had sent from across the apartment. It was one of those songs where you heard the melody and by the time the chorus came around again, you’d already started to absorb the melodic information of the song. I actually felt that way about everything Tegan contributed to The Con.

Tegan: It was my peak.

Sara: Maybe it was your peak. It was just such a specific time in her life, and every song she sent — there wasn’t much from me in terms of criticism.

Tegan: There’s a song of Sara’s called “Not Tonight” from If It Was You. I think that was the first song we recorded on Pro Tools. We went to a music store in Vancouver, asked to buy an eight-track, and the guy working there was like, “Why would you wanna buy an eight-track?!” He was like, “Let’s maybe buy a computer.” We set up a microphone, Sara played this song on acoustic guitar, I panned it to the left, I told her to play it again, and we panned it to the right — it was our first time recording stereo guitar. It was such an exciting moment. Then we burned it onto CD, and we listened to it like 42,000 times.

Most experimental song

Tegan: “Superstar” — just kidding. I’m sure we thought we were being very experimental.

Sara: Probably a lot of the stuff on Sainthood. We were experimenting with a lot of new production ideas, doing some writing together. “Paperback Head” is the one I’ll throw out there. The songwriting process was very unique. Tegan and I were in this new era of collaborating with other artists. We collaborated with Tiësto; this was not the cool thing to do in 2008. Now everyone does it. It’s very common for indie artists to now be featured on an electronic musician’s track.

Most stylistically pedestrian album

Sara: I’m gonna say something potentially controversial. I think our album Hearthrob is cutting edge in that, again, we were ahead of the curve — we were moving into a pop world with a Tegan and Sara twist. So many indie rock bands have gone into more of a pop sound since. It’s not as taboo to be trying pop even if you’re not a traditional pop artist. I think 50 percent of that album is leading-the-pack, experimental, pushing-the-envelope pop music. But to make pop music requires a pedestrian attitude. You are trying to reach the masses. So in some ways, a song like “Closer,” what makes it sneaky is that it’s pedestrian enough to get on pop music radio, but it’s queer, and also what is that bridge?! “Closer” was strategically pedestrian.

Tegan: Probably our first album, Under Feet Like Ours. I have trouble listening to it because it was so pedestrian. We were just capturing; there was no style. We’d just convinced our grandfather to give us some money. But that album was just late-’90s straight-to-microphone singer-songwriter.

The song they felt most aligned on

Tegan: “So Jealous” or “Walking With a Ghost.” Both of those songs felt like the future of what Tegan and Sara was going to sound like. Then right after that, Sara moved to Montreal and she found this air organ on the street. We were sending CDs back and forth, and I remember hearing those two songs and feeling so inspired. It just sounded so different. I always tell musicians, especially women musicians, how important it is to learn how to record yourself because then you learn what you really like and it gives you more control. And I feel like that whole album cycle, Sara was so experimental with her recordings, and it influenced how we heard ourselves.

Sara: When I think about being aligned, I go back to “Closer.” We both had to be on the same page. There was no way we were going to go in such a different direction without us both being willing to go there. It stands out as a moment in our catalogue where it was not just Tegan’s decision to do a big pop song. We both wrote on the song. We knew it was going to be a centerpiece of that album cycle, that it was going to be a talking point. It had to be — what’s the baseball metaphor? — a home run.

The album that caused the most conflict

Tegan: I remember Sara had written a song for Heartthrob called “Goodbye, Goodbye,” and we loved it but the A&R on our album didn’t. There was this huge fight that happened. We were crying at this restaurant called Mohawk Bend in Los Angeles. I feel like we’ve changed so much since then. Now, if someone said they didn’t like a song, I’d say, “Go fuck yourself,” and it wouldn’t matter, but I just remember Sara leaving the restaurant and being so upset. There was a lot of conflict on that record cycle because a lot of people were trying to help out. There were a lot more tears, arguments, friction between us and our management. They’re dear friends of ours, but we don’t work together anymore and I think Heartthrob was the beginning of the end. I have so much respect for huge bands. There are so many cooks in the kitchen. But it’s always just been us; we make all the decisions. So then, when we had someone come in and say, “I don’t like this song,” it felt like World War III. Like, okay, now we have 25 minutes to say good-bye to our family and friends. It was extreme.

Sexiest song

Tegan: I’d say “Closer,” but then I’m also learning “Drove Me Wild” from Heartthrob right now.

Sara: I think this question highlights the difference between what other people think is sexy and what we think is sexy. To me, “Drove Me Wild” and “Closer” are the least sexy songs we’ve ever written, just because they are not subtle. They’re songs about sexuality, but they’re not sexual songs. To me, a song like “Nineteen” is far more “sexy.” But a lot of the albums — at least for me — have been inspired by breakups, and I think Sainthood was an album written during and after a romantic interlude that was emotionally disastrous for me.

A lot of the songs I wrote for that album were written in the hopeful part. I had a lot of desire and lust. So a song like “Red Belt” or even “Alligator,” they captured that early stage of desire and disaster, whereas so many of our other albums are in the rearview mirror looking back at a relationship.

Most overlooked album

Tegan: For me, every one of our albums plays a significant role in the way our career has unfolded. We’ve had a really long career, and I think part of that is down to the fact that not every album has the same trajectory. The goal is different between records. The goal is not always “Sell the most albums, bro!” Sometimes, the goal is simply sustaining.

Sara has a song called “Nightwatch,” and I think that the production overshadowed the song and how beautiful it is. I think revisiting some of the songs from Sainthood down the road could be really cool. I think they’re really, really beautiful songs, but the production was harsh and experimental and pointy and industrial feeling. So I think some of those songs got overlooked by the fans.

Sara: If anything, I’ve always wanted to be a popular band and a well-reviewed band. I’ve always felt that we’ve worked really, really hard and yet we still kind of only hit 75 percent. We’re studying really hard, our mom got us a tutor, and then we do the exam and we still just get 75 percent. So it’s not necessarily that I think an album is overlooked; I just worry that we’ve not been seen as a great band but only a consistently good band. That makes my ego want more. I want someone to say, “You’re geniuses.” That’s how hard I work, and that’s how much I believe in what we do. Not that we are geniuses; I just want a five out of five or a 9.0 on Pitchfork. That’s how I think in my brain. I don’t necessarily feel an album is overlooked, but I do think, Are we just good? Or are we great and people don’t know?

Most regrettable career move

Sara: I feel like any huge mistakes we made happened in our early career. I have felt since 2002 or 2003 that even if things didn’t pan out, I can stand behind almost everything we have done, all the choices we’ve made, how hard we’ve worked.

Tegan: I would say some of my biggest regrets are financial choices that we made. We had these light cubes for the Heartthrob tour; the budget ballooned because of them. Our budget was $25,000 for the tour, and all of a sudden it became $75,000 because we had two projectors that would light up the cubes, and I had a full nervous breakdown in front of our manager. It was the profit for the tour in my mind. I was like, Oh my God, how are we going to pay our bills? Then I get out on the tours, and the cubes were too big for over half of the venues. There are so many things like that because there is so much pressure for artists to just exist today. There’s so much pressure on you to provide a certain kind of show, and I don’t think people understand how expensive it is to do all of this. Ticket prices are locked, but then everything else is more expensive — hotels, gas, lights, life.

Sara: Welcome to Tegan’s TED Talk on inflation.

Best TV placement

Tegan: I think we will be forever grateful that “Where Does the Good Go” got a Grey’s Anatomy placement. Especially back in the early days of our career, in the early 2000s, placements on TV were huge. We used to joke that when we each bought our first apartment that it was with Grey’s Anatomy money.

Sara: My downpayment on my apartment was absolutely from Grey’s Anatomy.

Tegan: Also, again, at that time indie bands weren’t doing that. This was the beginning of being a band that was like, “Hey, we’re not getting radio, so we’re going to absolutely put our song in a TV show.” People would discover us through Grey’s Anatomy, and it’s not like radio; it’s not just nameless and faceless. People would come to us with this attachment.

Sara: It’s also been really cool to see our music in our TV show about our memoir, to see these scenes from our life because it’s not our voices, our production — we don’t sing the music, the twins who are in the show covered the songs. We could simply just hear the story. There’s something really moving about it. We were really saying something at that age. We had a voice, and we were singing these songs from within the maze of adolescence. Even now in my 40s, I listen back and think, This is so sweet. No wonder people were so excited and drawn to it.

Their partners’ favorite Tegan and Sara song

Tegan: My partner, Sofia, definitely appreciates music, but she mostly just listens to Kanye West. But when she heard “I Can’t Grow Up,” the new single off our new album, she turned to me and said, “This is the coolest song you’ve ever done.” I was like, “Well, it’s not us, it’s Sara’s.” And she said, “Well, it’s the coolest song Sara’s ever done.”

Sara: In our fan base, we have Tegan people and Sara people — Stacy is a Tegan person. But she loves a deep cut of mine called “Light Up.” She’s been asking me to play that song live or just in the living room ever since we first met 14 years ago.

The song that best exemplifies them as individuals

Sara: I wanna say “Back in Your Head” because I think there’s something fundamental in there. Really, all my songs are the same. I think if you were to analyze all my songs, you’d think this person has unbelievably low self-esteem. They’re interior. I feel like all my songs are about either anxiety or rejection.

Tegan: “The Con.” That song sums me up. It’s a very romantic song but about that fine line between anxiety, pining, obsession, and devotion. It’s super-direct and extreme about what was going on in my life. It was about this person who I was obsessing over and was in love with, and we were just lying there not doing anything. It sums me up perfectly. So much passion and excitement and intensity and perverse directness and also extreme frigidity and passivity.

Tegan and Sara on Their Best and Most Pedestrian Music