Sentimentalist Mag Interview

www.sentimentalistmag.com

Tegan and Sara: Hurts so good

As far as kiss-offs go, Tegan and Sara’s Sainthood is a whopper. Not so much 13 tunes of “How you like me now?” but rather 36 minutes of emotionally resonant, hard-won truths and “light bulbs.” The sisters Quin took the title for their exceptional sixth record from a Leonard Cohen song – “Came So Far for Beauty” – that, in the end, held 2007’s The Con in stark, stultifying light. With the song as a thematic template, Tegan and Sara found positions and founts of strength and wisdom they didn’t count on by looking inward to change what was happening in front of them, learning from their past romantic mistakes.

I spoke with Tegan before the pair’s late-October shows at New York City’s venerable Town Hall about her emotional journey from The Con to Sainthood, and how identifying with the physiological response that heroin addicts have when speaking about their drug abuse greatly influenced and healed her own want to be absolved of heartbreak and guilt.

Writing songs together for the first time, was there anything you were surprised to learn about the other’s process or personal lives?
Not really. We’ve talked about our writing processes for so long in front of each other …so I felt very familiar, and really understood what Sara’s process was before I even sat in a room and witnessed it. She didn’t lie. She really does take a really f*cking long time!

What’s your approach like?
It’s slow! No, just kidding, it’s not! It’s really fast. I just like to sit down, and as soon as I have a chord progression or a structure to a song, guitar or keyboard-wise, then I almost immediately start writing lyrics so I can get to the melody. Sara will hammer out guitar ideas for hours and then work on structure, then melody, and then lyrics, and that sometimes takes her days. Basically it’s like watching paint dry. I’m really glad we did it, and I definitely think we will write together on future stuff, but not in the same room.

Do you feel Sainthood is one of the most personal records you and Sara have put out, or perhaps one of your most personally and artistically satisfying?
The Con goes down in history as the most personal record for me. Even now, playing songs from Sainthood and The Con next to each other, I still feel more attached emotionally to The Con, because it was such an unrequited record for me. I was writing these songs about a relationship that I felt so possessed [by]. I feel more calm and happy about songs that I wrote for Sainthood than I do about The Con, but definitely the most satisfying, artistically. Sainthood was just such a challenge, and so fun and I feel like we pushed ourselves as artists, and also as players. We played the songs 100 times before we recorded them, so the melodies were hammered in. I felt like we were making a live record, like we had already toured it. I felt like I became a better musician as the record went on and more confident naturally.

One thing that’s been particularly amazing to discern is how strong, mature and hopeful the lyrics are. Both of you seem to be coming from a place of strength, albeit a battle-weary one. Do you feel that’s true, especially in contrast to The Con?
Definitely. The thing about The Con, which I think still haunts me, is that we were writing in the present tense, which is not something I do. It was really vulnerable and weak and heartbreaking, and at times kind of whiny. When I’m on stage playing those songs even now, and I’m in a completely different place, I still feel those buttons being pushed inside of me.

You’re still close to it.
Yeah. Sainthood definitely comes from a place of strength because, and I think for both of us, Sara was writing from a single’s perspective, and [although] I started dating somebody, I was writing about not being a freak. Not going to that very vulnerable place, not being totally insane, because it’s not necessarily good to go that far, or to be that extreme, or that intense. I also felt for songs like ‘The Cure’ and how, specifically, I had moved to the downtowny side of Vancouver, which is a really rough neighborhood, with drugs and problems, and being gentrified. But, it’s a great neighborhood, it’s beautiful, and it’s got a sense of community like no other part of Vancouver.

I wrote the songs [after] seeing this piece on how they studied [the] brain activity of heroin addicts. Not being high on heroin, but talking about the abuse. And then somebody’s brain activity when talking about being in an unrequited relationship or being passionate and obsessed and in love with someone, and [it was] the same parts of the brain! It’s actually brought me a lot of comfort, because I felt out of control, like I didn’t have any sense of myself. So, ‘Hell’ and ‘The Cure’ were songs about my neighborhood. I was using this sort of drug-addicted, crazy neighborhood as a metaphor for my own issues, and drawing the parallels between love addiction and drug addiction, and it inspired me to get back on the horse and try to find something else to write about.

When I’m on stage I definitely feel empowered because all the songs I wrote on this record are like light bulbs. They were all like epiphanies, like, ‘Oh! Okay! So this is what I did wrong!’ ‘Northshore’ is a laundry list of don’ts, and it’s kind of sad, because it’s like, Oh God, did I really do all of those things before? But instead of feeling bad, I’m just not going to do [that]. I’m aware of my problem, I’m aware of what I’m doing.

And then you say, “My misery’s so addictive,”…because it is an addiction.
Yeah! [laughs] I’m acknowledging it! And that’s good, and I feel comfort in that. I always tell people, fans, that I meet, or friends, who’ll be telling me how sad they feel and what they’ve dealt with, and how we’ve helped them work something or whatever, and I take a moment to reflect with them that that’s something we all have in common. I mean, deep down inside, we all think that our loss, our love, is most intense and special, and people can get close to it, but never truly understand it, because we’re all individually narcissistic. But, at the same time, we do feel comforted by each other’s experiences.

I love that you and Sara took Leonard Cohen’s “Came So Far for Beauty,” as an inspiration on Sainthood. Who brought this song to the table and what about it touched you in relation to your own experience?
teganandsara2Sara brought it to the table, and it’s interesting because I dated someone who was a total Lenny fanatic who bought me all of his books. I mean, I’m Canadian; I grew up with Leonard Cohen. I knew who he was. But, she used to send me his music all the time when I was on the road. So there I am in New Orleans a year ago, and Sara had been working on this guitar part for a couple hours, and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s lay down some other things! Why don’t you take the vocals, and I’ll do some drums.’ So Sara’s like, ‘I don’t have anything written, but I’ll lay down an idea I have so that I don’t lose it.’ I’m sitting there silently as she’s recording her vocal, and she’s singing ‘Came So Far for Beauty,’ and I had no idea it was Leonard Cohen. I was like, ‘This is the most amazing piece of music Sara’s ever written; the lyrics are incredible. Sara should leave our band [and] join another band. She’ll never get her due justice here.’ She finished, and I’m in awe, like, ‘I don’t understand! You said you don’t have any lyrics. Did you just pull that out of your ass?’ [She says], ‘No, it’s Leonard Cohen! It’s kind of secret. Whenever I don’t have any lyrics written, I’ll just sing Leonard Cohen as a placeholder.’ But unfortunately, the song fit so well with the piece of music Sara had written, we just were never able to get the rights, and weren’t able to secure permission to use them. The song summed up exactly where we were at, and we decided that even though we couldn’t get the rights to use the song, we titled it Sainthood instead of ‘Came So Far for Beauty.’

I think “Someday” is one of the greatest things you and Sara have ever done. It reminded somewhat of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” and I don’t know why, saying, “Mark my words, I might be something, someday.” What a gut punch.
Well, thank you! The short answer to that is… well, there is no short answer! My parents got divorced when we were five. Then my mom met someone else when we were six or seven, and they fell in love in front of us. It was incredibly influential on Sara and I. Love was super important, and love was wrapped up with music. Our stepdad was obsessed with music. We had Bruce Springsteen posters in our house; framed, mind you, but still our household was a rock and roll household.

When it came time to pick what we were going to do with our lives, it was Grade 12, we were 17 years old. We had no aspirations to go university. We wanted to travel and play music. We didn’t want to sign record deals or any of that stuff. And here we are, 10 years later, and we’re still doing that, and I think that both of us have struggled over the past 11 years with the idea that [it] is our career path. It’s somewhat unstable at times, and unless you achieve a certain level of success, you’re going to have to either, A: get a job eventually, or B: you’re going to struggle for a long time, and potentially your whole life. We’ve been so lucky and extremely business savvy and aggressive about our business because we’re taking care of ourselves and looking out for our future.

I think that ‘Someday’ in part is about this idea that I’m speaking in part to myself; that I made a good decision, and I’m gonna be okay, and I am proving myself. At the same time, I had just started dating this girl that I had chased for three years… that I wrote The Con about, and it was a complicated situation. I had just gotten out of a five-year relationship, and was having a difficult time figuring out how to get what I wanted, and I took all the wrong interstates, basically, and sort of floundered for a year. And then it was over. It just didn’t work out. We never got to date. I felt horrible, and wrote all the songs on The Con about it, and then spent a year out on the road playing them, feeling vindicated and powerful and sad all at the same time. And then we started talking again because she wanted to be friends, so I said, ‘OK, we’ll see what happens.’ Six or seven months went by, and she was like, ‘f*ck, I’m totally into you, and I keep denying myself. Let’s just try dating.’ So I wrote ‘Someday’ two or three months into that, when I was like that weird kid trying not to explode in class. Just really trying to contain myself. I didn’t want to go off the path. I did not want to become that weird creep from The Con.

So, ‘Someday’ was sort of a combination of me saying, ‘You have purpose, you are good, you are going to make it, you are going to say something. Maybe you already have said it, but you’re going to say something important.’ And at the same time, it was my way of pushing this button on this person, to basically say, ‘Get it together, decide!’ Everyone can say something important, which is why I said, ‘paint…write…and say,’ because not all of us are writers and not all of us are artists or painters, but all of us will eventually say something. We’ll all get there, whether it’s at 75 or 15, we do get to a place where we figure out what our purpose is. And for The Con, the girl that I was chasing, for her, it was that moment, I think, when she finally took a step forward and realized that she was going to have to challenge herself and her life, and what she thought of herself at that point.

I love that song. When I recorded it, it was madness, like 8,000 keyboards and vocals. Someone compared it to MGMT the other day.

Where did the idea to release ON, IN, AT come from? Granted, we know how passionate your fans are, but was this more a document with them in mind as much as you and Sara wanted to scrapbook such a busy, productive time in your lives?
It’s a combo of that. The idea came up about a year and a half ago, because we had been discussing our 10-year and how to celebrate that, whether it’s a DVD that includes everything we’ve done thus far in video form, or a magazine, or a book. We weren’t really sure, and I really pushed for the book. I was like, ‘We’re lacking in tangible items at this point, besides t-shirts and sweaters.’ I was late to the game. I didn’t even know Flickr existed until recently. I don’t have a Facebook account, [or] a MySpace account. I’m a little behind the times. All of the sudden, I was inundated with all of this talk, we can do this, we can do that, look at this Flickr site, look here at the YouTube.

So we were going to do a 10-year book, and then I was like, ‘That’s too hard. I don’t want to do that. Too complicated, too much work. There’s not enough time.’ So it was like, why don’t we just take a photographer out on the road and capture a snippet, a moment, a month of our lives from behind the scenes, and then reach out to all the different artists we toured with on the record, and other artists we toured with in our lives, and some of the crew and band. You know, write a book about touring; the loneliness and the fun and the fans and the whole thing. Just write a big book on how you live on the road. And then, as we started putting it together, it was so amazing and it looked so beautiful and it really came together, so it was like, f*ck, let’s do a couple more! We started strategizing the New Orleans book, and I called the photographer to come hang out with us two weeks beforehand. That one started to look so good that we decided to do another one! We were in Australia, and we always joke that when we go to Australia it’s like going on vacation because you have to fly everywhere. You can’t really drive between the cities. There’s no tour bus or anything like that, so you have all these days off because you have to fly all the time. So you end up going to Australia and playing six or seven shows, and you go for two weeks. There was a lot of beach time. We gave everyone a camera and a journal, and everybody saved everything that they got, like a vacation log. It was more work than making a record, and I would never do it again! If we do a 10-year book, someone else is gonna have to do that. I was very emotionally invested and it was a little difficult. I had a copy FedEx-ed to me yesterday because I’d only seen a very preliminary version of it a month ago. My best friend and another friend came to the hotel and we looked through the book for an hour, and everybody’s just like, ‘Holy shit!’ because I think people think, ‘Oh it’s gonna be like a ‘zine!’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s a fuckin’ coffee table book!’

–Carrie Alison

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Prefixmax Interview

This is another interview from www.prefixmag.com

Published on November 16, 2009
By Ethan Stanislawski

Sainthood, Tegan and Sara's sixth album (and second with Sire records), makes it clear that after a decade of prolific recording, touring, and rising popularity in a crumbling music industry, the twin-sister rock duo has proven its relevance in the face of all pressures and misconceptions to the contrary. Despite being identical twins, hower, Tegan and Sara Quin are not identical (no matter how much their trippy self-interview on Spinner fooled you). We spoke with Tegan Quin before a New York tour date and talked about where they fit on the scale between indie and mainstream, the lessons of writing songs together, and correcting misconceptions.

This is the first album you've primarily co-written songs together. How did that change the dynamic?

I think after 14 years it inspired us to show that there was this other way. I don't think that we'll exclusively write together now, but I definitely think it was a positive and successful experiment. I think we also learned a lot about each other. Sara is a very meticulous, slow writer who works on lyrics for a long time and perfects guitar parts and melodies. I sort of blow through songs very quickly. I think now that we understand the differences between it, I definitely have a different perspective on her writing abilities.

You and Sara like playing off the fact that you guys are twins. How have you tried to differentiate from each other?

We've been writing for our band for so long now, so we encourage other to go as much as we can in our own direction. Sara moved to Montreal eight years ago, and I lived in Vancouver, so we definitely got different influences. Sara has a lot more pop and soul, and she really has more of an indie-rock taste (I'm more mainstream in my tastes). So I think we encourage each other to be independent and have different styles, because when we're together people will continue to see us as twins.

I think there's a big generation gap between how you're perceived in terms of being a mainstream band vs. and indie band. Do you feel that younger fans appreciate you any differently than older music fans do?

I think we thought we were indie for so long and part of that community, and with So Jealous, we started to get more support from that community, and then we got more mainstream attention on The Con. I think Sara thinks we're an indie band, but I don't. I don't think we fit anywhere perfectly. But I do think there is an age gap. When we play live and I see teenage girls and teenage boys in the audience, I definitely think we're in the mainstream. We're influencing a younger generation. But I do see we're starting to get support from a lot of indie magazines and indie websites, so there is a portion of our audience for them. Which is kind of neat; I think our music is as much for them as anyone. It doesn't matter where they're coming from.

The issue probably would be if you faced any major-label pressures when you moved to Sire records (with The Con in 2007).

We signed to Sire in order to get our entire catalog in one place. We'd been on a bunch of different labels, and Sanctuary was in danger of going under. Warner was the only place who offered to buy our catalog in one place. We were also grateful that they only wanted us to do two three records; everywhere else wanted us to do seven records. We thought that was the rest of our career, potentially. That's 10 f*cking years. I don't want that kind of commitment. But it was a huge step with Warner, because we were able to have a label internationally, so there'd always be someone for us to go on the road, and we'd know whether some markets were supportive or some were not.

It was also that Warner was a cool label that had a lot of cool bands. Our publicist with Warner works for so many different types of bands. That doesn't make them all good, but sometimes I'll look at the list of bands Warner has worked with and think, "There are so many good bands on that label that are considered indie rock." It's great to be on a label with them and their hit songs.

I definitely feel a lot of the critics of the band have been males who have worked since the '90s. Now that you've reached your sixth album and have still been popular, have you seen any changing attitudes?

Well, at the beginning of our career we were 19 years old. In the first few years there were certainly a few things people latched on to. The fact that we were twins and really young, and that we had already come out, a lot of journalists thought, "Oh, this was something dreamt up by the record labels." But for years we just tried to get through that by being musicians, running our band and writing our songs. And then that band T.A.T.U. came out, and I was just like "Jesus Christ! Oh, here we go." It's not so bad in North America, but I remember going to other countries and people would be like, "So you're like T.A.T.U?"

We spent a lot of years undoing the damage of the mainstream version of the impressions of what we are. I definitely feel like after the last couple of albums those questions have gone away and people have moved on. The fact is we're still in an industry that doesn't necessarily reward women for being rock stars, feminist, business savvy, or aggressive. It's not 1960, but it's definitely not what it should be. I think there's so much on the Internet now that people can find the truth. I don't actively try to correct people's impressions of us.

I actually found one interview where you talked about all the hype surrounding one set at the Lilith Fair. Do you think that's going to be an issue again?

It seems that every interview we get asked about that, and we get the "misconception" question a lot. I learned early on that we can't really control that. Whenever we do an interview or retrospective, we try to put out a very good impression of ourselves. It does become less of a concern, and as I've gotten older, I haven't worried about it as much.

So where do you see yourself going in the future?

Well, we owe Warner one more record, which we probably won't put out for another couple of years. After that, I'm not sure. I imagine that Sara and I will make music together for a long time, but I don't know if it will be as "Tegan and Sara," or if "Tegan and Sara" will retire and stay home and make music. It's hard to say, but I definitely think we're reaching a point in our lives when we don't want to be constantly lugging it out there. We're at a good point right now, and I think the most important think to me and Sara is that we're comfortable with our music. I think the future for "Tegan and Sara" may hold a little less touring and more writing.

Do you think you'll always be writing music?

Yeah, I just love to sit down and write songs. After 10 years, I'm at a place in my life where I feel pretty stable and calm and healthy (which means right now I'm writing less). [Laughs.] I think I'll always be writing, but I can see why a lot of musicians stop touring as they get older. It gets away from the parts about music that I love.

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Pitchfork Review

This is the article from www.pitchfork.com

They gave Sainthood a 7.3

Carefully selected case studies could convince you anyone can be a star with a well-timed leak, blog post, or P2P push, but there are still few substitutes for good ol' fashioned hard work. Case in point: Tegan and Sara, who have worked their way up from cult status to wider prominence through a steady regimen of touring and a gradual musical evolution and maturation that's made it harder to ignore their increasingly impressive achievements.

Those achievements peaked to date with 2007's The Con, but that shouldn't negate the merits of the Canadian Quin sisters' somewhat likeminded follow-up, Sainthood. The Con, sympathetically produced by Chris Walla, found Tegan and Sara trading the occasional preciousness and banal power-pop tropes of their earlier work for something more eclectic and personal, and Sainthood, which once again enlists Walla, continues to showcase the pair's confidence and peculiarities.

What's different is that the Quins have closed the aperture ever so slightly, retaining some of the character of the album's predecessor while applying a slightly sharper focus to the songs and their musical scope. In theory, tracks like "Don't Rush", "Hell", "The Cure", and "The Ocean" count as power-pop, but tightly wound as they are, they're closer to high-strung 1980s new wave (think: Missing Persons), albeit thankfully short on the attendant affectations and coursing with subtly dark undercurrents. "I've got the cure for you," sings Tegan in "The Cure", and in fact, given the enigmatic lyrics, it's unclear if the object of her attention should accept or refuse the help. Or whether they even have a choice.

Those aforementioned songs, incidentally, are Tegan's-- the more pop-oriented of the pair. But to set up such a dialectic does a disservice to sister Sara, whose own pop instincts clear the quirkier hurdles of songs like "Arrow" or "Red Belt". Certainly, "On Directing" or "Alligator"-- two obvious album highlights, the latter playing like a late-night backroom flip of Madonna's "Holiday"-- don't lack in hooks, but they're developed with a welcome austerity and Sara's disinclination for easy "big moment" build up and release.

Sara's "Sentimental Tune" is no less restrained; it could easily go for Kelly Clarkson bombast, and maybe would even be better for it, but kept in check, that song-- like Sainthood as a whole-- achieves a less immediate but perhaps more gratifying impact. The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect. Which it does, just on its own terms, a broadcast from two idiosyncratic musical minds whose biggest talent may be in making their most eccentric traits sound downright normal. After all, from the Quin twins' perspective it's the audience that's accessible, and they know just how to reach them.

— Joshua Klein, October 30, 2009

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Paste Magazine - Catching Up With Tegan Quin

Another interview from http://www.pastemagazine.com

When Tegan and Sara Quin speak of devotion, they do not speak of its most traditional sense. Instead, the word conveys a sense of pressure, one to live up to romantic ideals instead of religious ones. This is a feeling they not only describe but demand in the first lines of their sixth studio release: “Would you take a straight and narrow, critical look at me? / Would you tell me tough-love style, put judicial weight on me?”

But Sainthood, out Oct. 27 through Vapor/Sire, is just one way that Tegan and Sara have explored the art of self-presentation this year. While their book trio, On In At, became an encapsulation of their musical evolution, their growing online presence is still an ever-changing depiction of their ongoing dedication. Paste caught up with Tegan to discuss all of the ways in which the two have opened up, thanks in part to Twitter, The Temptations and ink blots.

Paste: With the launch of the new website, Twitter account, and Vimeo account, the two of you have really boosted your online presence in recent months. Why did you guys decide to do such an overhaul?
Quin: We did the website before we went in to make our new record, and that was partly because we decided we weren’t going to hire a crew or document our record the way we had on The Con. So we sorta felt responsible to have some sort of protest, where we could update people about how the record was coming. Obviously that’s just the sort of age we’re in now, is that people want to know all the time where you are, and what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with, and how you feel about it. And so our compromise was the website. I had a personal Twitter account, just to follow friends and follow funny people and stuff, and then a musician friend of mine outed me and was like, “Tegan’s on Twitter!” All of a sudden I had all these requests, and I was like, “Shit,” so now I’m just sort of part of that world. But I kinda like it. I’ve never had a personal MySpace or Facebook or any of those things. I hate the idea of my personal life being on the Internet, even for people I know. But I really like the concept of Twitter for a more professional way of posting to people, and telling them that we’re putting up new tour dates or posting up a photo of us at a video shoot. I like the immediacy of it, for sure, and the simplicity of it. But yeah, it’s a lot, and I mean, the exposure comes hand-in-hand with putting a record out. You all of a sudden have the the record company, and your management, and press, and your own internal forces all sort of putting stuff out there to start promoting the record, and it feels a bit like media blitz diarrhea, kind of action.
Paste: I’ve also noticed that you do all of the video editing. It’s definitely more than I can do, and I can safely say I have more spare time. With everything else that you have going on, how did you verse yourself in that whole realm?
Quin: I just felt like, even before the Internet was a big part of every teenager’s lives, back in the day I’ve just always had an interest in documenting what we were doing, mainly for my own selfish, narcissistic needs. I just thought, “God, when this is all over, I want to remember all of this.” I like taking photos of course, but the videos are that much more relevant to me. Everybody in our group is so funny, and everybody’s so entertaining. It’s like, I put the camera on and everybody’s like, “Turn it off!” and then they tell you 10 jokes. I just thought it was so fun just to bring it home. When I get home, I show my friends, or my parents, or my girlfriend and be like, “Look at how funny this is!” Then the Internet sort of exploded with all these options for putting videos and photos and everything up. We just kind of automatically attached ourselves to it. We were like, “Yeah, that’s fun.”

So the editing just kind of came along the way. I have absolutely no interest in being the person that does it, but I just am because every time Sara tries to do it, she just ends up handing it to me. Sara’ll be like, “We’re going to do a video today. It’s no big deal though; it’ll take you two seconds to edit it.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t take two seconds, and I really don’t want to do the video.” Then she’s like, “Tegan, please! It’s something that I really want to do.” And I’m like, “But I end up doing it. It’s not really something you want to do. It’s something you want me to do.” So basically, it’s like my part-time job. But I appreciate that very much. Thank you for even noticing that I do it.

Paste: Well, I am a fellow geek, though not so much with video as I am with websites and blogs. So I tend to notice the credits even though other people may overlook them.
Quin: Well, thank you. That means a lot to me. You’ve inspired me to continue. Another year of videos ahead.

Paste: Speaking of hands-on efforts, personal accounts, and the Vimeo account as well, I saw that fans who managed to snag the premium bundle of your book trio also received handmade ink blots made by you guys. Then I noticed that ink blots were scattered through one of the books. What inspired the inclusion of these ink blots, both in the book and in the premium bundle?
Quin: We finished the first book after we toured the States. As we started to put it together, the first initial PDF that Emy, the designer, sent to us, we were so excited that we decided immediately that we were going to try doing more sessions like that. So we wrote together in New Orleans, and our photographer followed us around for that, and then we did the same in Australia. As we were putting the second book together, Sara and Emy were hanging out, talking about what the concepts of that book was going to be. We had all these funny, weird transcripts of us in the studio, working in New Orleans, and all these really crazy, weird Hitchcock-inspired photos, and these really random interviews with people that we did while we were there. The theme seemed to be that we were almost engaging in an experiment, because Sara and I never actually physically sat down together before. This was, in reality, very much an experiment: Would it work? Would it be a disaster? Would we actually write anything? Would we kill each other? Would we go to prison? I mean, there were so many variables that we just really didn’t know what the outcome was going to be.

We were discussing that, and Sara and Emy got further into the design. It just became clear that it was an experiment, and we just thought it’d be so funny to do the Rorschach testing. So there are all these Rorschach tests in there with all these funny questions that Sara and I filled out, multiple-choice, that we scanned and put in the books as well. And we took it that much further and did up handmade ink blots as well, and then tested ourselves using the Rorschach tests. Basically it just became this weird, big art project that will either excite and interest people, or it will be one of the books that they just kind of skip past. So I think it’s really interesting. As one of the people that was experimented on, I found it very interesting.

Then when it came time to do the pre-release, the company that we were using, they suggested that we might want to do a deluxe version. I thought, “Oh, it’d be fun to make ink blots,” and everybody was on the page for that. So we spent a day of our lives making a lot of ink blots, and then we signed them and bagged them up. They sold out the day we released them, which is really exciting because I didn’t think people would actually care that much about the books, but we’re kind of down to the very low numbers. I do think people are going to love it. I’m really excited for people who get it. It’s one of those items that, when the word spreads and kinda leaks on the Internet, people are going to get really excited [about]. It’s a pretty expansive, very extensive look at Tegan and Sara. I think it’s pretty fascinating because it’s from our perspective, but it’s also [producer] Chris Walla’s perspective and our mother’s perspective. I think it’ll be cool.

Paste: Yeah, absolutely. I was especially interested in In, where you discuss that trip to New Orleans where you guys made your first attempt to write songs together. Since you both had never done this before, what exactly did you guys learn of each other’s songwriting habits?
Quin: Well, I both think that we learned it was really boring, watching someone else write a song.

Paste: [laughs] Okay.
Quin: It’s not like you just magically pick up the guitar and go like, “I was walking with a ghost,” “Ooh, that’s a good one.” It’s hours of hacking out a guitar part, and then it’s the insecurity of writing a melody and words in front of them. It was kinda miserable, not because of each other. I just don’t have any interest in doing that with anyone. It was one of those experiences where it’s like, I’m really glad we did it and it was a worthwhile adventure, but it was also just hella boring. So like I said, I’m really glad we did it. It was really exciting—oh, my mom just arrived. Hi, Mom. So yeah, I think it was really good. I mean, ultimately, probably the most exciting thing is that we just survived it, and we wrote, we accomplished eight or nine songs. I think in general it was a success, and I think we just learned that we can do it if we have to. If there’s ever a point where someone challenges us to write a song together on a game show, we’ll be able to do it.

Paste: Excellent. Well, I’m glad you guys are armed with that, because you never know what type of game shows are going to come up these days.
Quin: True. Oh my god, you’d be surprised at some of the silly things people ask us to do in interviews too. So we’re set, we’re ready. We can handle anything now.

Paste: Good deal. Speaking of stuff you need to come up with on your own, you guys have talked before about where the title Sainthood comes from, that Leonard Cohen lyric [“I practiced all my sainthood / I gave to one and all / But rumors of my virtue / they moved her not at all”]. But where did the book titles come from?
Quin: We sorta started talking about the titles really late in the game… Sara and Emy actually came up with them. I’m not sure which of them came up with which one, but basically they just e-mailed and said, “We have this idea,” because I had sent explanations of what I saw the concepts being. The first book I thought of being centered around this idea that we’re travelers or explorers, and we’re out on the road, and that’s sort of like behind the scenes, and we have no home, and this and that, whatever. So they said back, “What about On Nomadism?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” So that’s how that went: I sent explanations, and they thought the abbreviations would be awesome. So the books are On Nomadism, In Experiment, and At the Longitude and Latitude of Australia. So they’re brilliant. Basically that was really smart. That’s how they came up with them.

Paste: Sara had talked before about how you guys used just five musicians and a few overdubs. Yet when I listen to the album, your sound seems to have gotten bigger than ever. How did this become the end result?
Quin: Well, I mean, the magic of sound recording.

Paste: [laughs]
Quin: I mean, with The Con or So Jealous, or any one of our old records really, we just had such a different approach. It was sorta like, record the drums, bass, and then overdub everything, so it kinda gives it a more thorough, and cluttered and kinda crazy sound. With Sainthood it was more like, we all stood in a room together, dreaming up our parts and playing them for months. And so I think in a weird way, even though there was less tracks and less overdubbing, the parts that we came up with just made more sense. They took up more space. We took more time with the actual sounds, getting the right guitar sound rather than just getting a guitar sound and overdubbing like three multiples of it or something like that. We actually painstakingly would spend hours perfecting these sounds of the keyboard and guitars so that it filled up the space that it was going to end up taking.

When we started rehearsing this record to go out on the tour—we just finished today, but we have been rehearsing for months—it was so easy. I think it was Sara that said she thought we were doing something wrong, because it really, really is easy when you do it that way. You get everything all figured out and once it comes time to perform it live, you just do what you did in the studio, like everyone just kinda does their part.

But yeah, the result was that everything kinda had its own place, and it just made the record feel more full. It sounds bigger and feels bigger, I think, because there’s not anything taking away from the sound. I think each song really just has exactly what it needs.

Paste: Paste recently posted a review of Sainthood, calling its sound a combination of pop-punk, new wave, and Euro techno elements, mixed with Cyndi Lauper. When I listened to it, I thought of all those things, plus a little bit of newer Against Me!. I was interested in finding out how you guys come to include these sound elements, because they are different from what you present in So Jealous and The Con.
Quin: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think So Jealous was very poppy and then we went rock, indie rock with The Con. But we started to experiment with a lot of these things. “Nineteen” was definitely one of the heavier tracks on The Con, and so “Northshore” and elements of “The Ocean” was directly formed. “Are You Ten Years Ago” off The Con was live drums but mixed with electronic elements. So when I first heard “Arrow…” Sara, basically just, she records these weird things. She’ll take bean cans and weird clocks in our house and record them … puts distortion over top and makes these electronic backgrounds, and then Jason [McGerr of Death Cab for Cutie] just drummed over top of them. So we went even further than what we did in “Are You Ten Years Ago”, because we implemented a lot of those kinds of weird background collaborations on “Paperback Head,” and “Red Belt” and “Arrow.” And I think both of us ejected, we just tried to employ as many different ideas as we possibly can.

We listen to a wide variety of music, and we’ve been making records with each other technically for like 14 years, even though we didn’t start professionally til ’99. I mean, we started recording ourselves when we were teenagers, or as my mom likes to say, when she bought us our first Fisher Price tape recorder when we were four. Oh, when we were two—she just corrected me. And she said that we loved it. We would sing songs and tell stories, and we loved listening back to ourselves. Sara would say we were little narcissists.

But I think that with just every record it’s like, okay, we’re going to have to go and play this for two years. This is like our final record here, or on our record here, so we want to make sure that we’re interested in playing it. I think, definitely, this record covers so much ground. Sara was listening to The Supremes, and all of a sudden you have “Alligator,”, this weird throwback to real soul but also pop and R&B. I was listening to a ton of electronic music. We were writing the collaboration with Tiësto, and I sent to her eight samplers all playing weird, random rhythms, and she turned that into “Paperback Head.” We’re always going from whatever we’re inspired by, like you hear something on the radio and then become instantly excited to go home and write something. With “The Ocean,” when I originally wrote that, everybody loved it and was like, “Let’s make it like The Con‘s] ’Call It Off.’ It’ll be acoustic, and quiet, and sweet.” And I bought everyone a copy of The Gaslight Anthem’s [The] ’59 Sound and was like, “No. I want to be a different kind of band this time. I don’t want to play acoustically. I want to fuckin’ rock out and feel it, and it’s gotta be loud for me.” So there was a lot of different shit going on.

Paste: You talking about all the different inspirations behind Sainthood reminded me to ask about “Feel It In My Bones.” What exactly about Tiësto’s track inspired the lyrics that you proceeded to write?
Quin: We met Tiësto because we performed with him, and he mentioned to me that he was going to send us this track. Then I forgot about it, and then he sent it, and I went away. When I got home, I checked in with Sara and said, “Have you started this yet?” She goes like, “Yes, I have all these really great ideas.” It was right around the time where she had been working on that kind of music, like “Arrow,” and “Night Watch,” and some of the more weird stuff. So when she sent me the song initially, I was like, “I don’t know. I mean, have you heard Tiësto? It’s dance music, Sara. It’s not like weird, alternative music.” So we started straightening out our ideas, but we probably committed or submitted five or six different chorus ideas. We basically recorded a crapload of vocals, and ideas, and harmonies, and parts, and then sent it them. They would send back the track with which part they liked, and then we’d fill in the holes. So it was probably about a three-month process. The lyrics themselves, the chorus part came from me, but Sara wrote all the lyrics for the verses, the pre-choruses, and the bridge, and then sent it to me. So I was just influenced by her lyrics. So I can’t speak for Sara, but I can say, I can hypothesize that it was about a relationship that probably wasn’t going well.

Paste: [laughs]
Quin: And she thought it was sad, and that it was like writing a song to somebody and hoping that they hear it, but they probably will never hear it. Probably what she always writes about.

Paste: I was about to say, that’s an recurring theme in your music anyway. I guess it’s not too much of a stretch.
Quin: Don’t say that to me. What do other people write about? I mean, I hear records and all I hear is relationships. And people are like, you guys really like to write about relationships, and I’m like, “Who doesn’t? What else is there to talk about?” I go get coffee with people and they’re like, “Yeah, work sucks. Anyway, let’s talk about my boyfriend.” And I’m like, “Yes.” That’s all that’s really relevant. We’re terrible. We’re narcissists. All we care about is ourselves.

Paste: [laughs] You’re right, in that it’s a really common conversation topic. Even some of the songs you said that you wrote about your neighborhood back home, if you were to broaden them out a little bit, they could have been like, “Oh, this relationship sucks.”
Quin: Oh no, it was. You see right through me, because it was. They were just metaphors for my bad relationship. I was just trying to find parallels to my neighborhood so that people thought I was broader and more well-rounded than I really am. But really, I was just writing about me.

Paste: With that said, with Sainthood you guys are continuing to explore the art of relationships—this time, as you guys say, becoming “anything for someone else,” or “martyrs for the cause.” With these observations that you’ve been making over your lives and continue to write about, do you guys consider yourselves any better versed at the dating game?
Quin: I think so. I think we’re exaggerators and we can be very dramatic, but I think so. I think that we definitely are learning. I think that it’s really hard to be in a relationship when you travel all the time. I think that it’s difficult. You’re always away, and you’re always busy, and I think that’s ultimately why artists have these weird, tumultuous lives. We’re always writing about heartbreak because we’re always touring, and so we’re kind of always heartbroken, and sad, and missing someone, and doing the wrong thing. I think also Sara and I probably don’t have any worse a track record than anyone else, but we both are so obsessed with analyzing ourselves, and analyzing our relationships, and analyzing our condition in the world. There’s been like three records where I was basically talking about the same relationship. I was just going over it again, and again, and again. I’m not sure if we’re that bad at it or we’re just kinda obsessed with it.

Paste: I think any person could safely say they’ve overanalyzed relationships before, so that doesn’t make you two stranger than anyone else.
Quin: [laughs] Oh, we’re no different at all. We just happen to be the ones with the microphone.

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