Tegan and Sara

Tue 23rd Dec, 2008 in Features

Tegan and Sara may be twins who have grown up together and always played music together, but it doesn’t mean that they live in each other’s pockets. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. It would seem that, when not on tour or recording albums, they don’t even live in the same city!

“We’ve actually, for the last seven years, lived in separate parts of the world,” Tegan Quin reveals. “Sara lives in Montreal, Canada, and I live between L.A. and Vancouver. We always find the time to do our thing – our band and organisation is spread out over North America, and we definitely tour a lot so we spend a lot of time together, but we all look forward to going back to our respective homes.

“I think it has more to do with who we are as people: I really love the west coast and I love the water and I like nice weather and Sara’s really into hibernating and hiding in the cold and loves going outside and being in the snow. But ultimately we’re always working on new music, with new projects on the go – and we tour like mad men, so we see each other.”

Unbelievably, the sisterly duo don’t even write together. Instead, the songs on the albums prior to their 2007 album The Con were written quite separately and apart, and whomsoever takes the vocal lead on any particular number is, more likely than not, the composer of the song.

“We’ve actually never written until a week ago,” she reveals. “We went to New Orleans and sat in a room together for a week – but for fourteen years we’ve never sat in a room and written songs before. The majority of our writing has come over the years through recording at home and sending an MP3 and getting feedback from each other. The Con was our first attempt to play over each other’s demos and contribute vocals and guitars, so we wanted to take it one step further and attempt to write together, which was an interesting process.”

It seems to have gone well, with Tegan revealing that, in the space of seven days, they came up with seven songs. Nevertheless, she still sees songwriting as a solo venture, as it’s something she enjoys doing in isolation. “I’m definitely glad we did it,” she says of writing together for the first time.

The approach of writing together rather than separately means that the personal reflections contained with the songs are revealed in their most naked form – simply one person with an acoustic guitar.

“When we were sitting in the room writing together it was extremely difficult and uncomfortable,” Tegan admits. “It was also fascinating to see how she does it and how I do it. Sara has lots of funny cute little techniques to get herself through the process of writing a song. There’s a certain level of anxiety inside of me because I don’t really know what there is to do to write a song – I just do it. And up until the moment that it’s done I feel anxious. For me I think the process was a little more stressful than it was for Sara.”

Previously to this writing experiment, Tegan and Sara have always furiously written copious amounts of demos in order to arrive at a selection of songs they deem worthy of the final album. For The Con, they wrote in excess of thirty demos to send to each other before they had even presented them to the band. So to work together for the first time and start at the beginning, at the basic beginning of the song with structure and melody, was quite something.

“It definitely put more focus on the song,” she emphasises. “I think The Con is a pretty dark record and we were experimenting with different things. We worked from the demos…and broke it apart and mapped out all the things that we recorded and laid down everything we could, then put down drums and bass.

“We did everything backwards and in unconventional ways,” Tegan explains, “and I think that it’s a very moody record, with a lot of different ideas and themes. [For the next album] we’re going to focus more on the basics of rock, and not so much on keyboards and so many vocals – really just focus. This time around we’re going to try using [our live band] and see what kind of sounds we come up with when we approach it from more a live-band kind of feel.”

Tegan and Sara’s The Con is out now, with the band touring Australia this summer. See Gig Guide listings below for details.