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Starting their careers at the tender age of 18, sisters Tegan and Sara Quin are now 28 and have come a long way since. From small to major label, from touring Canada to touring worldwide and from album number one to album number five, they are truly at the top of their game. Gigwise spoke to Sara Quin to find out the latest on the band's epic existence.
After supporting ‘So Jealous’ out on the road for a lengthy period of time, they shacked up in Portland at the beginning of this year with producer Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie) to make album number five (‘The Con’) and now, coming to the end of the album cycle, they’re already looking ahead to the next. In a musical world rife with illegal downloading and albums leaked long before official release dates, Tegan and Sara seem to have cultivated the kind of patient anticipation that is hard to come by these days and plans are already in the works for album number six. “Our intention was just to chill out but we’re both workaholics so we both recorded...I would say we have about 30 songs between the two of us already. We’re both single-ish and bored,” she laughs. “We had a lot of time on our hands so we ended up being quite productive all things considered!”
Up until now, whilst grouped together by name, Tegan and Sara have always written separately for their records with writing duties split evenly - but for the first time they might be attempting a joint writing effort. “I think me and Tegan are going to go do some recording - maybe in New Orleans or Seattle or somewhere else, go rent a house and write some songs together. We’ve never done that before so it’s going to be fucking fascinating! I have no idea what’s going to happen, it could be completely productive or it’s just going to be abusive and we’ll end up in prison. I think it could be fun, and honestly until now I don’t think we had the skills to collaborate all these years, I don’t know whether it was a competitive thing or what but it would have felt very weird.”
With a healthy sized song history, choosing the current touring set-list can’t have been an easy task, but with loyal fans wanting to hear old and new combined, they’ve adapted it to please all - even sacrificing their own embarrassment over very early material, “We’re trying not to be too self-indulgent. We’re playing two kind of unreleased songs that nobody’s heard and then a couple of b-sides and some songs that just make me cringe because a lot of them Tegan wrote – I remember in excruciating detail when she wrote them because we were 17! I’m 28 years old, I don’t even like to look at photo albums from high school, it’s so unfortunate, I should have been on an island from the ages 11-21. Pretty much anything we wrote before we were 24 years old makes me want to die, so to be playing it in front of thousands of people is just awful and totally embarrassing. But the kids seem to like it and I appreciate that we are performers and at some point we have to put aside our own feelings.”
With so much time currently spent on the road, I’m curious whether it ever takes a negative toll on a musician’s life. “You know it’s weird, I pretty much spent the last 8 years in relationships and that was really challenging - leaving someone, a human, who you love and spend all your time with and are co-dependant on to a sickening degree – that is hard to leave. This year and this whole album I’ve been single so I care a lot less about leaving. It doesn’t feel so much like leaving when you’re leaving your books or your depressing apartment.” But the required forced intimacy touring requires is always hard to get used to, she says. “The thing that’s awkward for me - and I know it doesn’t seem this way, but I’m quite introverted and I spend a lot of time alone. I’m very reclusive and I sort of putter around for days and days without talking to anyone or seeing people or even speaking out loud. So for me the real awkwardness of going on tour is acclimatizing to being around grown-ups 24 hours a day, on a bus, in my pyjamas, without a bra. It always feels like, ‘Oh yeah I’m going back to that weird world’ it’s like never-never land with the lost boys.”
With it being such an intense time for American politics and with musicians and bands voicing their opinions left and right, Tegan and Sara stand in an interesting position. Both politically active but obviously both unable to vote as Canadians, their opinions can thankfully find a home on stage. “For us it’s interesting being a Canadian band touring so much in America – we say something every night about voting and being supportive of Obama. I’m not sure it makes that much of a difference, it’s not as if our audience is predominantly Republican – it’s a very liberal audience so for us it’s more of a pat on the pack saying ‘Step up and let’s all be excited that we all agree that we think the Republicans are shit.’
"I think what is important is simply participation, I think the one thing about the youth which traumatizes me a little bit – and I think it has a lot to do with the internet and faceless/nameless communication that happens with chatting and texting, is that there’s a disconnect between the idea of action and participation compared to watching from the sidelines or talking about it on a blog. People forget that just saying it out loud doesn’t actually change anything, you have to actually vote, you have to actually write letters to the people who can make change.”
And who can resist asking an intelligent female about their opinion on Sarah Palin. “I don’t think that a hockey mum should run the country! I just don’t. Call me old-fashioned but I just think the people who are running this country should be smarter than me! There’s something about hearing Sarah Palin talking her ‘gosh-darnit-hockey-mum-just-like-you’ bullshit - that might be charming for some people but it absolutely terrifies me.”
It seems a rare thing these days for a band to grow at a steady pace, without blowing up over night and to maintain that progress and success 10 years later, but that’s exactly what Tegan and Sara have done. “I wanted to make change, I wanted to perform, I wanted to be in front of people and I wanted to impact people. So my happiness comes from doing what I’m doing now, I don’t hit my alarm in the morning and think, ‘Oh god I don’t want to get up.’ I love getting up, I love that I make my own rules and that I’m my own boss and that I get to travel the world. I get to do what I want to do and get to make a difference, I don’t want to pursue something just to make money, but I love that I can have food and a house from making music - I mean it’s amazing, it’s such a cool thing."
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