The mighty quins

T
he pop-esperanto language practiced by Alberta sisters Tegan and Sara Quin (whose sixth album Sainthood was released last year) ensures that the pair are as comfortable playing Lilith Fair as they are opening for veterans like Neil Young and The Pretenders or touring with The Killers and Paramore. Their songs – bright, melodic confections with hard emotional centres – should, in theory, resonate with anyone in possession of a nervous system.

"You're right, we've spent a good portion of our career supporting other bands," Sara concedes, "it's only been with the past couple of albums that we've been able to go out and headline. But even when the perception from the press or other people was that we had this isolated audience of women or only gay people, we would say we were able to attract all sorts of people. Like with the Paramore tour, we can go out and play to 10,000 kids that mightn't necessarily know or like our band, but we're gonna try to win them over anyways. I don't know if we're just competitive or ambitious, but we definitely have a strong desire to prove ourselves all the time."
One of the more intriguing paragraphs on the pair's bio: Tegan was approached by Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs to contribute the song ‘His Love' to the audio version of his book A Wolf At The Table in 2008.
"Both of us were familiar with his work," Sara explains. "I would even say Tegan was a superfan, and she ended up really connecting with him. It was such an interesting project, and quite ahead of its time I think. The publishing world is experiencing a lot of what the music world is experiencing, it's difficult for new authors, and creating these multi-media packages is going to be the way of the future."
What the sisters do isn't a million miles away from Burroughs's tendency to use himself as a specimen case, transforming his own foibles, failures and embarrassments into fodder for art.
"Absolutely. Both Tegan and I obviously write about our own experiences, but we're also writing about the human condition. I have always been particularly put off by this question from the press where they'll say, ‘Oh, it's as if you've just published your diary,' and I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm fucking 30, I don't have a diary anymore!' It's this image of me with a pink diary with a little lock on it. Why, when Leonard Cohen writes about his romantic adventures, is he this eloquent poet, and when I do it it's like I've torn the pages from my plastic My Little Pony diary? I always found that to be extremely sexist, like they were assigning this really low value to me ‘cos I was a girl, and it was even worse that I was gay, because I was a girl writing about other girls. There couldn't be a lower common denominator.
"But I see myself as writing about the thing that people are probably most obsessed with. Even in the most horrific times, people dying, or war or whatever, there's always this common thread of love and companionship, this idea of a witness to your life and you being a witness to someone else's life, and creating some kind of relationship, likely in the hopes that you'll procreate in some way, and build a little human that will continue on. For me writing about love is as profound as writing about politics. As Tegan and I get older we realise that the stories we have to tell are not that different from the stories probably everyone has to tell, we just have a way of being able to channel it into something, that people can use for the soundtracks of their own lives."