Saints alive! It’s Tegan & Sara
Tegan Quin talks family, sexuality and fifth album Sainthood
Why aren’t Tegan And Sara world-beating megastars yet? We don’t know, but surely it’s only a matter of time. The dashing identical twins from Canada have been ploughing away for over ten years but it was with 2007’s The Con and this year’s blocky, rocky Sainthood that they’ve really begun to grab the world’s attention. Clickmusic sat down Tegan Quin to pick her brains about her homeland, being twins and what she’d do in life without Sara.
Are you proud to be from Canada?
I would be more nationalistic about my heritage but because it’s such a gigantic country and there are so many different kinds of people, it’s hard sometimes. I’m dating someone from California, and whenever I go visit her, I’ll say ‘oh I’m going down to LA’ but whenever she’s coming up to visit me, she’s like ‘I can’t wait to get to Canada’ and I’m like ‘it’s not Canada, it’s Vancouver!’ It’s a really complicated way of saying it, but I’m proud to be from Canada, but it’s the size of Europe so it’s really strange. It’s like asking, are you proud to be from Europe? But I do love it, it’s a great country. It’s beautiful.
Do you think it’s influenced your music and the way you write music?
I think that the thing that Canada has the most effect on us and the band is the fact that over the last ten years we’ve probably received $200,000 dollars - maybe more - in grants from the government. All our music videos before this record, most of our trips to Europe before the last record and most of our press trips to the States - we got grants to do all of that. I don’t know if you’d even know who our band was if we weren’t from Canada, because of their funding and letting us off the ground.
Are you leading the way in terms of Canadian music?
[Laughs] If you’d asked me that like three years ago then I’d say no because we weren’t mentioned in the same breath as a lot of Canadian bands, but there’s a lot of the bands who you don’t hear much from, although that’s partly because of downsizing and bands not having the infrastructure to be able to afford touring here. It takes a lot of organising to come to Europe and going down to the States. Getting visas alone for each person is thousands of dollars and when you have 12 people, that’s a lot of money. Going to Australia, it’s like $4000 per person. So I think we’re leading in some ways only because we’re one of many, but one of few bands that can afford to travel over and have the support, in the fanbase and the media.
Do you think that you and Sara being identical twins is a sort of gimmick that’s helped you get to where you are?
I think it’s certainly been perceived that way and the media does its best to continue that by focusing on it a lot. On days when I’m feeling pleasant, I think it makes sense, because I’m like ‘twins are weird!’, especially identical twins. But on bad days I’m like, we’re just family, we just happen to play in the same band. Lots of siblings play in the same band – there’s twins that play in The National and that’s not the focus of that band. And we’re a band – we really are. Our band changes and we use different instrumentalists and musicians and producers and such but Tegan & Sara the organisation is really a multi-faceted group of people, so we try not to focus too much on it. On this record we’ve tried to take control of the image a little bit and play with the idea of us being twins a bit more, because we wanted to take away the projections… we project our own image and everyone hopefully attaches what we’re in control of, or something. But it certainly helped us in the beginning of our career, that’s for sure [laughs]
Do some people place too much importance on your twinage, and your sexuality too?
With the sexuality thing, it’s the same. On a good day I think it’s super important. I remember when I was a teenager and there were hardly any girls in bands - in bands that I knew about - and none of them are gay. And I remember when I found out about the Riot Grrl movement - most of those girls weren’t gay, but it was so queer friendly and I remember being really inspired by them. Thousands of times people have come up in the last ten years in letters, emails, MySpace messages, yelling from the audience, or meeting and greeting us after a show and said thank you because they’re queer, or young or have siblings. I think it’s pretty significant that we’re a mainstream band with gay people in the band, but we’re not making gay music, we’re just gay. I’m not driving my car in a gay way, I’m not walking in a gay way - just because I make music and I’m gay it doesn’t mean I make gay music. Sometimes I hate that, because I don’t want to be limited to people who are queer or who gets queer music. I want everyone to relate to the music.
You and Sara are obviously very close. If one of you were to die, would the other continue making music?
Well that’s a very morbid question! I think I’d always make music no matter what, even if the band broke up or someone died, but it would be impossible for me to know what I’d do next. Even now, aged 30, I love what we do and I love being in a band and it’s really fun, but I’m not like ‘I’m gonna do this forever’ you know. I want to make music forever but I think we might get to a point where we want to explore other corners of the universe and other interests. We both like to produce and Sara is an A&R at a label in New York for a band there. We both do other things, but I don’t know, if Sara died I probably wouldn’t be thinking much about our band, that’s for sure.
Does your mother prefer your or Sara’s songs?
I think she likes it all equally! She’s the most honest, but she’s a mom about it. She’ll say ‘oh my God, I love this one song of yours’ and then she’ll say ‘I like Sara’s new songs’, which I think is a mom thing, I don’t think she can say which one she likes better, I think she likes certain songs but I think with my dad and my step-dad I can almost pick out based on their feedback which ones they’ll like. Me and Sara always guess. We’re like, ‘I bet dad hates 'Night Watch!'’.
Do they like the new album, Sainthood?
They do. My mom has given the most comprehensive feedback, but she lives in the same city as me, so she’s biased, or maybe I’m biased about her opinion, but our parents are really proud of us. Mom is a social worker and works with teenagers, so a lot of her clients are fans of us. She works in a private school and the kids will come in and they know that she’s our mom, and at first that made me feel weird, and then you kinda feel bad for her too, I hope the kids aren’t just using mom, but my mom’s really up to date on a lot of things. She knows more current music than I do, not like Taylor Swift and Kanye - she knows about hip, indie rock bands because she’s going to sites that are reviewing us and reading other press and knows who we’re being compared to, so I think for my whole family, it’s like they’re kinda involved – they just have to be, our lives are so overwhelming sometimes. I think its how they feel close to us.
Your new album seems quite a change from The Con?
Well The Con was such an anti-studio record. It was just Sara and I and Chris Walla, and we went to his house every day and recorded in the basement, then in the last few weeks we added drums and bass. It’s a pretty sad, dense, dark record, and it’s rocky and heavy too, but it’s intimate and it feels very personal - a lot of people connected to it. For a lot of people it’ll be the record most people will stay connected to, which I understand because when I play those songs, even now, I’m like [fake cry] because they’re emotional and really intense songs. Sainthood was created in a completely different way. It was a band record. We recorded as a band, we rehearsed as a band and the songs changed because of the band. It was a Tegan & Sara record, but it’s really been influenced by all of us. It’s influenced by two years of touring beforehand, our musicianship has exponentially grown this year, and Sara and I wrote and sang on each others' songs too, which we’ve never done before. We recorded it in the studio too, which makes for a completely different sound. Like on The Con, on the song like…’The Con’, we would record four or five guitars and all my vocal tracks and I’d recorded three or four different synths, then Sara would record her backgrounds. Then we added drums and bass. Compare that to 'North Shore' on this record - I recorded two guitar tracks and overdubbed some at the end, and then it was drums and bass. And it sounds fucking heavy, because it’s recorded as a band. We wanted to be able to play the record live. The Con was so hard to make work live, because I have like four keyboard parts on every song. Sainthood is more open sounding, but louder and harder and faster.
Was there any influence from the label on this record?
Oh my God no. They didn’t even hear it till it was being mixed. We’re really harsh to our label, and not in a mean way. They handed over the budget for the record, we did everything, and handed over the finished product. You know, some part of me thinks if we ever want to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of records then we’d probably have to let more people get involved and make us more mainstream, but I’ve never aspired to sell millions of records or be famous. I just want to be successful. And success to me has changed over the years. Pretty consistently over the last ten years, success is playing music for a living. And I tell you, the bigger we get, the more radio we have to do, the more touring we have to do, the more stress, the more pressure, the more picking and poking and people peering in - that’s not that fun. I just want to play music.
I’ve never seen your live show yet but from what I’ve seen it looks like half stand-up comedy, half music?
Yeah, we’ll make jokes and stuff - Sara and I are really good at interacting with our audience. When people get really yelpy and loud and are badgering us a bit, I’ll be like ‘bring the house lights up’ and let’s interact with the person who’s being crazy. My favourite part of playing live is the differences that happen every night. Some bands want to get up there and play perfectly – I love it when I play a perfect show but it doesn’t happen very often because I’m so emotional and really paying attention to the audience and the music and myself I get distracted, then I forget things or forget lyrics. I think our audience enjoys it, I don’t think they walk away and think they’ve been ripped off. They feel like we’re real people. I like it when I go see a band and they’re good at interacting, they’re funny and they’re telling good stories or whatever. Some bands don’t do that, I know its part of our appeal, and that we’re very unique in that sense, but I like it. I want to know what the band thinks, I want to know what they wrote their songs about. I’m intrigued.
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