Twin sister is watching you

Being in a band is an intense experience. Being in a band with your twin sister must be doubly so, particularly when you’ve been signed up to a label since the age of 18 and have been touring and recording for five albums' worth of material since.

“We live in different cities now [Vancouver and Montreal] and we also live in different cities to our band and crew, and I think that’s good for all of us,” says Tegan. “With all the touring we do it’s really nice to get off the road and not feel like we have to hang out. When you’re a musician you become this one dimensional person. So it was nice to have other interests and other friends some of whom didn’t even know I was a musician in a band with my twin sister until I told them.”
In fact all that pressure meant that initially Tegan and Sara were thinking of knocking it on the head for a while.
“The Con was technically going to be our last album, it was to be our fifth with Sanctuary [they’ve since moved to Warners],” she resumes. “We felt we needed a break. So we were going all out. We chose Chris Walla as producer because he said that he was interested in making a full record with a story that led from song to song. We’d probably spent a year writing separately at home and demoing quite extensively. Then with Chris we started building each song from the demo. A song like ‘I Was Married’ has all of Sara’s original tracks except for the piano and the vocals. He didn’t want to change anything. But there will be more albums!”
Nowadays when tension got too much in the studio Tegan and Sara have a stress-relieving hobby. They make a television show called Trailer Talk, instalments of which can be found on YouTube (you can access them through the Tegan and Sara website).
“We’re quite narcissistic,” Tegan laughs. “We figured that if we recorded everything we do, then in the future when we’re starting to forget people, these would be great to look back at. So we shoot a TV show in the basement or the back of the trailer on tour. And when things are really tense in studio someone would just turn to the camera and start talking.”
And do you talk much about the state of the world and rock and roll?
“Between the internet and this expanding indie underground there’s definitely more options now. Not just musically but politically and socially. It feels like there’s less pressure to fit. I mean, I don’t think people out there necessarily know or care that I’m a queer artist. And I don’t think it’s my job to make a big deal of that and to challenge people. But I do think that just by being up there I’m challenging people. Just getting on stage can be statement enough.”

Tegan And Sara play The Button Factory, Dublin (February 27) and the Limelight, Belfast (28)