says Tegan. “I like the production and the instrumental storytelling that was happening in electronic music, but I still really missed [lyrical] storytelling, so when we got off the road and started to write Heartthrob I had been challenged by Sara and a few other people to try to write outside of where I usually write and not to write self-depreciating, self-loathing shoe-gazer music.”
A Sense of Nostalgia
Heartthrob’s abiding sense of nostalgia—it’s a record staring off into space in the middle of the party—comes not just from its tales of lost, incomplete or unrequited love, but also from sounds evocative of another era in both music and in the sisters’ young lives. They delved back even further into their parents’ love of Bruce Springsteen, Kate Bush and Tom Petty, adding their own ’90s influences. “Heartthrob is almost like two sides of a record,” explains Tegan of both the album’s sound and its title. “My songs are sort of romantic and nostalgic . . . And Sara’s side of the record is more about rejection and sadness and sort of heartbreak that she’s suffered, but also it’s like a very reflective tone—so she’s basically singing about being well past that. “The commonality there is that we’re both singing about people that we were interested in and we both have this awful tendency to idolize the people that we like, and so I kind of love the idea of heartthrob . . . because I love the idea that we are not the heartthrobs; we are the ones pining for our heartthrobs.”
An “Everyone Band”
So deep is Tegan and Sara’s immersion in the world of dance music that this association is now perhaps partially eclipsing their actual songwriting and performance talents in the same way that their being twins and
LGBT has in the past. “For a lot of years when people didn’t talk about us being gay— back in 1999 through maybe 2003 . . . I felt like being twins overshadowed our music,” say Tegan. “Then from 2003 to like 2010, it felt like being gay overshadowed our music. And now all that anyone talks about is our production style and all the pop and dance collaborations that we do.” “Everybody’s looking for an angle,” she mulls. “[But] in a strange way I have more in common with straight men than I do with anyone else, because I’m singing about girls!” In fact, Tegan hopes that Heartthrob will make Tegan and Sara an “everyone band.” “We’ve spent a lot of our career opening for huge acts, and I like being on a big stage; I like looking out at 10,000 faces singing along—and I have never seen that as something we could do [as headliners],” she explains. “But all of a sudden I was like ‘Why can’t we have that—and be credible?’” “So the challenge became let’s make a record that is absolutely heartfelt and real and credible and great, but let’s make it so that people hear it.” c
Tegan and Sara spoke very openly with CULTURE about medical cannabis and cannabis rights. The sisters acknowledged they smoked the plant when they were younger. “Sara and I have made no effort to hide the fact that when we were teenagers we smoked a lot of pot. We were ambitious teenagers—we wrote a lot of music; we did well in school; we volunteered on a youth teen-line; we had jobs; we took piano lessons. We were busy, but we also smoked a lot of pot.” And even though Tegan and Sara no longer use cannabis, it’s something they continually joke about with fans during live shows—as any simple YouTube search using “Tegan and Sara” and “marijuana” will reveal. “[I]t’s definitely an icebreaker [on stage] . . . We always joke that we’re kind of like Phish, but for our generation,” Tegan says. “We have a lot of diehard fans who follow us around, and I swear to God people smoke so much pot at our shows!” But when it comes to the medical use of cannabis, the artist-siblings regard it very seriously—Tegan even describes the plant’s illegal status as “kind of ridiculous.” “I know multiple people right now who are struggling through Stage 4 cancers, and the fact is that cannabis is just a massive support and help in those situations,” she says. MARCH 2013 • CULTURE 21