Image credit : Tallie Kane

Tallie Kane chats to Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara about songwriting, being a pillar of the queer community and musical maturity.

For those of you who don’t know Canadian twins Tegan and Sara, start lending your ears to their alt-pop musings, turning between their fingers more complex notions of heartbreak and the absurd than is seen in the Indie ocean of the UK.

I caught up with Tegan Quin before their first Headline show of their UK Tour, and talked to her about songwriting, being a pillar of the queer music community and musical maturity.

After a two month break from touring, the girls are already packed with upcoming projects. “We’re thinking about releasing all the demos from this record because there’s so many we recorded and so much of the new record sounds like the demos that we thought it would be really cool to release them, so we’re thinking about doing it as a box set.

I have a side-project with this guy Hunter Bergen from AFI, and I actually just did this project with this writer who’s just putting out his new book, but rather than doing an audio version of it he’s created a soundtrack for it and I wrote a song for it, I’ve never done that before, like never written for someone else.”

Tegan and Sara are already a driving force in music in the States and Canada, often unknown over here except for their die-hard fan-base that are gradually getting larger by the second.

“I mean for us it’s like we’re really excited about it, it sorta feels like ‘Finally!’ I mean for some people they think its our first or second time over.

I think that had we blown up on the first record people would have been ‘Oh they’re teenagers, they’re not credible’ but now we’re twenty-seven we’ve proven that we’re the ‘musical geniuses’ behind the project, there’s no strings y’know?”

Fans who have listened to the band since day one will have noticed the difference in style and attitude from the first record ‘Under Feet Like Ours’ to the most recent record.

Gone are the Grunge roots that the girls found incredibly influential as they moved into the music world, ‘The Con’ comes across as an incredibly methodical and passionate album, that at times delves into stranger waters, showing a keener difference between the twins’ songwriting abilities.

“I think I write traditional pop songs, and Sara just writes ‘Out of the Box’ y’know, ‘Like Oh, Like H’ and ‘Relief Next to Me’ I mean those aren’t traditional songs, they’re strange. Sara always thinks that she writes the bummer songs of the set!”

There is an obvious difference between the girls’ style of writing - hardened fans will notice the difference, which Tegan herself finds is invaluable; “If she was writing the same songs that I was writing it would be like a children’s pop band or something, It’s good that we have a little bit of depth. She writes the depth. I write the heartbreak.”

Those who do know Tegan and Sara will notice that their sexuality has played alongside their fame, deemed as pillars of the queer community; “I think we’ve always been really comfortable with it, certainly through our evolution musically we’ve also had an evolution personally in terms of our confidence.

We obviously care less and less about being cool and care more and more about being honest and sincere and good. So I think in terms of sexuality I think we’re very aware of the fact that just like others before us we are clearing a path for the next generation.

It’s becoming less relevant that you’re queer and more and more relevant that you are part of society, a musician, and that it’s normal.”

Comments have been closed for this article

 

 

It's Quin, not Quinn :).

Kerry - Sun, 13 Apr 2008

 

 

Thankyou Kerry - fixed it now!

Alex Harries - Sun, 13 Apr 2008