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Interview with Sara Quin

Tegan and Sara have officially become a band that needs no introduction, playing large enough venues that, if you were lucky to have seen them touring over the past 10 years, you can say you “knew them when.” The 29-year-old twin sisters have branded themselves as one of pop-rock’s greatest songwriting duos, creating poetically poignant lyrics about romantic anxiety, heartbreak that is quite literally “Hell,” and the plight of moving on from something that felt otherwise permanent.

After a decade of writing songs (each on their own – Tegan from her home in Vancouver, Sara in Montreal) and touring to share their live harmony arrangements and amusing stage banter (sisters!), the band’s moniker has surpassed being their names and become a well-known entity for quality pop songs.

It’s no wonder the queer community has celebrated them so much and so often. As out lesbians, Tegan and Sara have allowed themselves to be used as veritable poster girls for attractive, talented and successful gay women who have no qualms about their sexuality, even bringing girlfriends on the road with them and participating in the True Colors Tour and the OUT Magazine 100 in 2008.

Besides a booming merch line, designed largely by Sara’s ex-girlfriend Emy Storey, Tegan and Sara have released a DVD, It’s Not Fun, Don’t Do It, and are preparing for the publication of three books: On, In, At.

So far, Sainthood, Tegan and Sara’s sixth full-length album, has reached number one on Canadian iTunes and number three on American iTunes charts in its first week. The supporting tour is boasting sold out shows internationally, now through early spring. What used to be an easy band to contact is now balanced between two publicists (the major label contact and the girls’ long-time PR guru), and so incredibly busy that they have time to do press only if they have a day off in between shows.

Sara was able to talk to me on one such off day, in between several other interviews, two days before Halloween. She was candid and eloquent, with a lot to say about having a public break-up with Emy, the punk song that was written about their sexuality, and going from broke Greyhound bus tours to building an eclectic and dedicated fanbase.

AfterEllen.com: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is your new video for “Hell.” It seems like as soon you as put it out, your fans were wondering what it meant and what you were trying to say. What was the idea behind it?

Sara Quin: Well the cardboard cutout of the blown-up pictures, we had used that theme on our photo shoot for the album, and we had talked a lot, conceptually, about Sainthood as a title, and we looked up old frescos and sort of religious paintings.

So we talked about these themes for album artwork and photo shoots, and when we approached Jamie Travis, who directed the video, he asked us for some treatments and a couple of ideas we had been thinking about.

One of things we sent to him was a photo in which we had taken a blown up photo and popped the head out and put Tegan’s head through it. We were using it as sort of a photographic way to represent the idea that you’re not yourself, a surface version of yourself and what is really happening and what you really are behind the facade.

AE: So what’s up with that creepy figure in the mirror? SQ: I think it’s just that we needed a person of conflict. Jamie Travis was the director of “Back in Your Head” and I don’t know why he came up with this figure, specifically, but one of the things we had approached him with in the treatment for “Back In Your Head,” when we did The Con, about this dream – most musicians have this dream or some version of this – where you’re about to perform or you’re performing and there’s no one there, or there’s like one person there. People are draining out of the club, and you know you’re doing a bad job. He had sort of run with this idea of the figure. So I think, thematically, it goes back to this nightmarish idea of the covered observer. AE: Your videos always seem to have some sort of mystery or deeper element. Do you think you’d ever do the typical sort of pop video where you’re playing the song and there’s a dramatic storyline with actors doing what it is you’re singing about?

SQ: It’s never been something that I wanted to do. Personally, I find it really strange to have other people in our videos. I’ve never really understood that. I grew up on sort of the classic music video, which was always about the person. Like Madonna videos, Bruce Springsteen videos – sometimes they would interact with other people, but there was rarely a narrative happening.

I don’t love performance videos for our band … I love when a band translates onto film what they do as a band. I just feel like with Tegan and I, I can’t see how we’d do that in a captivating way. That’s not to say that we’re not captivating, we’re just not crazy – I wouldn’t want to hang upside down or anything.

We have a tendency to take it to a quirky sort of narrative level where we’re just like doing strange things and looking strange. I think it’s visually arresting to have the two of us. It’s hard to not want to play with those ideas.

AE: Definitely. The last time I talked to Tegan was about a year ago right before you started recording, and she was saying that you had talked about making an album that was less about relationships and love, but when I first heard Sainthood, I was like, “It’s all about relationships and love!” Were you trying to get away from it and just couldn’t? SQ: Myself, personally, I never really listened to music that wasn’t about personal experiences and romance and love and break-ups and heartbreak – all that sort of stuff. To not write about those things would be – if there is a certain situation that inspired me, I would never not write about something other than love, but because this is the outlet for that part of me. I never personally made a mission to write about something else.

The thing I definitely feel – the perspective of where you’re writing from – I’ve always written from the perspective of being in a relationship. And with this album, there was definitely a part of me that wanted to remove myself, maybe, from the scenario and think more about the end of relationships, in general.

You know, my parents’ divorce – I was thinking a lot about that when we first started writing for this album. I’d just turned 27, and 27, 28 was the age my parents were when they were divorced and I can really remember them around that time. That was really interesting to me that I was getting out of a long-term relationship and starting to think about what kind of person am I, am I going to be this sort of relationship person who cycles through and gets in a new relationship?

I guess I kind of realized I was the kind of person that wasn’t going to find my soul mate, or whatever, and then be with them forever. I was thinking from that perspective a lot on this album.

AE: Your fanbase is so dedicated that they know who you’re dating, who your ex-girlfriend is. Is it ever weird to you that people are so into your personal lives and possibly read into things? SQ: It’s not necessarily weird. It’s only really happened for me with one, my one main relationship. It was such a public relationship for me – public in that Emy was so important to the band, you know, she was doing the artwork, art design and the stage and was on tour with me.

We were a different band then. We were playing to a couple hundred people a night. It didn’t bug me to be sort of transparent about what was going on in my personal life. She was my personal life and she was on the road with me.

When that relationship dissolved, it was uncomfortable for me to know that it had to happen in a public way. Even though we are still so close and such good friends, it was awkward to be feeling really private about what’s happening and people are asking you about it.

But I mean, it’s still such a small – I mean, I know a lot of our fans talk about it or whatever, but the majority of people don’t care and don’t talk about it. I mean it’s weird how certain people will ask in certain publications, but, like, Spin or Rolling Stone haven’t. AE: Right, because there’s a certain dynamic with your lesbian fanbase versus typical indie rock music listeners who don’t care who you’re dating. And now you’re playing these huge venues, so it’s got to be crazy to see a sea of baby dykes and 30-year-old dudes wearing Tegan and Sara t-shirts. SQ: Yeah, I definitely think we have a wide range of people drawn to the band and the music. It’s interesting. My first experience with touring was, I guess it has been almost 10 years now, but we toured with Neil Young and you want to talk about a wide, diverse spectrum of people: From some extremely devoted, almost to a fanatical degree, to the sort of casual Neil Young listener. Young people, old people, rich people, poor people.

I think if you’re the type of musician who aspires to connect to a lot of people, at some point you start to see how many different kinds of characters will be attracted to your shows.

It’s the same with us – I’ve certainly seen the audience grow and change from a sexuality perspective and gender perspective, but also a genre perspective. Some people are more interested in our music, some people are interested in who we’re dating, but I don’t think the people who are super, super interested in who we’re dating or what we’re up to in our personal lives represent the majority of people.

And that makes sense to me, because I think that’s with every band – there’s always that group of people that’s taking it a little bit too far. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to be more awkward. If you don’t want to have to shut people out or set boundaries with people, that doesn’t come easily with me – to have to be like, “That’s inappropriate.” We pretty much don’t have to do that very often, which is great.

AE: Good! And on a similar note, I’m curious as to how you responded when you heard the NOFX song, “Creeping Out Sara.” What was your initial response? SQ: Well, it’s complicated. There’s so much sexism and homophobia in the world and in the industry, and Tegan and I have struggled with that our entire careers. So anytime we sort of feel like people are not being respectful, you don’t want to let it hurt your feelings, but there’s also a part of you that knows that – I mean, I don’t think those guys are bad guys, I don’t think they were trying to hurt our feelings, or be disrespectful or whatever, but I don’t think people very often think they are doing that.

There’s been lots of press or things said about that, and I think “Oh my god. If you actually knew what you said was really offensive,” I don’t think most people would do it or say it – they just don’t have that education.

But anyway, my first instinct was that this is a band that has a certain type of audience and it was more important to me that the audience was probably going to take it as a diss or as a license to treat us or think of us in a certain way. There’s not much you can do about that, you know? It just happens. AE: Yeah. As far as the songwriting for Sainthood, did you have any sort of priorities as far as trying new things, like your writing together for the first time. But did you have any other things you wanted to accomplish that you hadn’t tried on previous albums? SQ: We knew that we were going to record the album in a way that we hadn’t recorded our previous five records. Like we knew we were going to play the material live, like as a band in the studio and try to get full band recordings which didn’t really affect how I wrote songs, but impacted how I worked on the songs.

In the past, since we just sort of recreated the demos in the studio, there wasn’t as much focus on me writing background parts of keyboard parts because we could flesh that all out in the studio.

And in terms of the actual songwriting, I knew one of the variables would be in how we wrote the songs. Tegan and I have always written separately from one another. I didn’t want to make it the main focus of the songwriting for this album, but I did want to take a couple of shots at it, the first one being when we went to New Orleans and wrote together.

For as awkward of an experience as it was, it was actually quite successful. We wrote seven really great songs, and it was also when we started to talk about sainthood as a theme.

The Leonard Cohen song, “Came So Far,” was an inspiration and a muse, so that proved to be a really important time, and we continued to collaborate and write songs over the next few months, and a few of those songs ended up being B-Sides, and also “Paperback Head” made the record.

So it was an interesting experience. It also gave Tegan and I a different energy when we were approaching this album because we were both really wholeheartedly making an effort to be collaborative with each other in the earlier stages. So often we’d talk about collaborating, but this was sort of organically collaborating in the infant stages of songs, when they were just barely ideas.

AE: I asked some AfterEllen.com fans for questions and one wanted to know if Sainthood would be a good place to start if they’re new to Tegan and Sara. What would you say to someone that’s never heard you before? What would you suggest? SQ: What’s great is, I think this album – and I’d certainly say this about So Jealous and The Con, as well – but I think the album stands alone. I think if somebody discovered us on this record, they could easily go back to the previous material we’ve written and probably like it. Whereas if someone discovered us on So Jealous, I think this would be a natural progression for them.

I think the material is similar enough but also different enough that we’re the kind of band that has a fanship that isn’t just a one album kind of fanship.

But yeah, I think this album is a great place to start. I think it’s more of an accessible album, which I don’t think has to be a bad thing. Some of the albums that were really inspiring to me that still resonate really deeply were albums that sold tens of millions of copies. It’s pretty much like no one does that anymore. I think then it wasn’t so taboo to be mainstream of popular. I think this album can do that without devaluing what we do or what we’ve done in the past.

AE: Was marketability, or making it more accessible or more pop-y, a conscious thought while you were recording at all? SQ: Tegan and I kind of laugh about this question or idea a lot because we – I think people can do this or certainly have the skills to do this, but I am not sad with how our career has gone. But if I knew how to be more popular or more successful at any point over the last 10 years, if I could have skipped a step, I would have! It wasn’t easy.

The first three albums we put out sold less than 10,000 copies. We were broke, we made no money, we toured very sparsely, we often toured alone. We did Greyhound tours.

There were nights, even when we first started touring with So Jealous, that we were putting only a couple of hundred dollars in our pockets after a show. It was challenging. And at no point did I think I was purposely making music that wouldn’t be accessible to people. The goal has always been to be interesting to human beings, whether it was 200 human beings or two million human beings, I wanted human beings.

And so, with this album it’s the same thing. You just kind of write a song and go, “Damn, I think this is a good song. I hope people like it!” I think this album sounding more mainstream and accessible had to do with budget – we had more money than on our previous albums and therefore we were able to work at a better studio and record a lot of this album on tape.

It was a warmer, bigger sound. We played with really skilled musicians. We’re almost 30! We’re old! We want to write better songs. We want to get better at what we’re doing! AE: Yeah! I mean, if you don’t progress, obviously you’re not doing something right. OK, is there a song that Tegan and Sara don’t ever want to play again so “please don’t ask at a concert for us to play it?” SQ: [Laughs] I mean, I like that people ask. The big joke in our band is about the song “Superstar.” If we get through a concert and someone doesn’t yell “Superstar,” we get confused. Like we’ll walk off the stage and someone will ask, “Anyone hear someone yell ‘Superstar’ tonight?” It’s just that song, for whatever reason, and it’s usually – I won’t describe who it is – but it’s the same person. I swear to God, it’s like they travel around the world – it’s the same actual person but it’s the same kind of person that asks for that song at least once a night, once a show.

It’s sort of spooky. It’s like this song was engineered for one type of person and they come to the show and they’re like “Whoa – they played for hours and they didn’t play ‘Superstar.'”

AE: So you just never want to play it and make that person happy? SQ: You know what? We have played it, and actually, on our last American tour, Tegan and Dallas from City and Colour did a beautiful duet to that song. I despise that song on so many levels, but I think it has more to do with the production and the time – it feels really dated to me when I listen to it. It reminds me of being young and not totally knowing what we were doing.

But it was so interesting to hear Tegan and Dallas cover it. They did a more melodic, slower tempo version of it and their voices together were quite beautiful, and I found myself thinking “This isn’t a horrible song.”

AE: You were just glad you didn’t have to be a part of it. SQ: I was glad I was offstage as an audience member.

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