Tegan and Sara interview

It’s really not just about the music with Tegan and Sara, the powerful twin duo that have recently released their newest Album Sainthood. It’s about creating a life that mirrors their desire to express their art-form to the best of their ability. Their amazing music is some powerful icing on the cake. Tegan and Sara have released six albums, have been touring for a decade and continue to hone their craft by pushing boundaries in their writing plus empowering themselves simply by adhering to be the best that they can be at every moment: professionally and personally. If you happen to google (or bing) Tegan and Sara, and peruse through the vast amount of information about them out on the net you will very quickly see that these women are gifted in their ability to be themselves. Their voices are clear. Their thoughts are focused. Their minds are bright. Their humor is catching (seriously laugh out loud funny). Their willingness to be truthful is refreshing. It’s not always peaches and cream, and like with any human being, less than optimal situations arise which may prove to be quite problematic, but even within these times, the ladies collect themselves and always do the best that they can.

They’ve embraced new media and have made it their own. They are surrounded by people that help them grow and empower their brand, as they see it, from their publicist, to their product designer, to their concert crew. It’s all a clear reflection of Tegan and Sara and who they choose to be in the world, as women, artists, friends, activists, or any other identity the world offers to them or they choose to take. Take a moment to take in their web site, plus their products and you’ll see their aesthetic embedded into every detail. They have got THE best t-shirts (just had to put that in there…they are really quite cool.)

Have you seen their Reflections video series?  (It’s must see, really, do it!). It’s a great way to tap into their every day creativity and their fun. They have a lovely and active blog (their official Tegan and Sara site) where they share pretty candid thoughts regarding themselves, the world and of course lots of fun and lighthearted experiences. Their twitter account is active, and they engage in the conversation, which is lovely to see. The majority of the online media engagement is done by Tegan. She seems to be quite at home in online community building, plus she’s very comfortable using all the tools that she has available to her.

I had the pleasure of conversing with Sara Quin as she took a breather during the Sainthood Tour.  If Tegan and Sara happen to be playing in your city, go check them out! They are not to be missed

Being a new mother has necessitated in me that I look at everything with a discerning eye. A particular litmus test arises: would I want this person/experience around my daughter, and how would it add to her ability to be more of herself.

Tegan and Sara are artists that I would be honored to have my daughter look up to. She can see, from a positive perspective what it looks like to live your life with authenticity and lightness, even within a world that at times facilitates deception.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I know you guys are totally busy.

Not a problem, no no, it’s good. It gives me an excuse to sit in the hotel room drinking coffee and eating fritters.

Oh yum yum.

I’m basically Mariah Carey right now (laughs).

When I was looking at your stuff and listening to your music, and sort of taking you guys in visually, I had all these thoughts that came into my head, and this is what came to mind: refreshing, alive, intelligent, lovely, endearing, not at all in any way seem jaded. What you put out to the world, is really quite admirable and authentic.

Oh thank you, that’s very sweet.

In what ways do you care for your expression? Another way to say that would be, how do you stay inspired to be your best always?

Well I have to admit, or disclose I suppose, that there is some balance to that. We definitely try to be as genuine and authentic and fresh and positive and inspiring. That’s been an important thing, but I think the balance to that is that it’s been a long time and a long career and there’s always good with the bad, and I think that the feeling around me and Tegan and our camp or whatever is that it’s not always sunshine and roses, and we don’t always feel good, and Tegan and I don’t always have a loving relationship. Or maybe it is loving even when we’re not being loving toward one another. But I think we try not to hide that too much, and maybe that’s the refreshing part. Like I don’t feel like we have to bury any of the things that maybe would seem too real or too exposing. We try to sort of like just be ourselves and I think there’s a relief in that, or that allows us to live a really honest life even though it’s sometimes a very public honest life, or an honest public life. I think we’re able to be ourselves and maybe not feel like we only have to present the good stuff or the positive side of stuff, you know?

Yeah, I think that that’s part of the whole thing. And it’s really admirable to be able to maintain authenticity in your choices with the kind of life that you live, you know? Because there’s so much that you guys have put out there. You know what was really interesting to me, upon reading your bio and also seeing a little bit of your twitters, or Tegan’s twitters, about practicing yoga. How has that manifested in your life? When did yoga come into your life?

The yoga part?

Yeah, the yoga part.

I have not been participating in the yoga experience with Tegan and some of our band and crew. But I tease them because they’re all west coast and it sort of became this thing that they were all doing over the last couple of years. We were actually looking for a new, we were hiring some new personnel for this tour, we’ve expanded a little bit, and jokingly we sort of put down that one of the things that we were looking for was a yoga teacher, and obviously we are not anywhere near the level of success where we’re like “Let’s hire a chef and a yoga teacher and a basketball coach. I always wanted to learn French, let’s bring out a tutor.”

I think we were sort of just joking around, and then one of the positions we were hiring for was a new merchandise manager, and someone was “Ah, we’ve got this great woman and she’s a yoga teacher and a barista.” And I was like Jesus, she’s like all my favorite things wrapped up into one human being! And so we hired her, and part of hiring her, we were like “You know, we’d love to give you an opportunity to do yoga on the road.” And so there’s about six or seven, I guess there’s regularly about six or seven of our large crew that are out on the road right now, including Tegan, who three times a week do yoga with her, and they all seem really into it. I snowshoe and drink coffee, those are my hobbies, those are my extracurricular activities. So finding coffee is like, when they do yoga, I’m like, “I’m going to find coffee. I’m stretching. I’m doing downward dog all the way to the coffee shop.”

The only reason I brought that up was because when you were speaking about the authenticity of maybe not having the light and fun things always happening to you guys, and that you do have things that may not necessarily be, you know, when you’re not getting along too well, people think that yoga’s all about chilling out and feeling good, and a lot of the time it brings up all kinds of crazy stuff that you’re like “Oh My God, I don’t feel so good, this is kind of hard.”

You know it’s funny, it’s like there’s this sort of cleansing cycle that happens I think in everyone’s life, not just the artist’s life or the road musician’s life, but like why I go through what I go through every single day, why anybody does what they do. There’s sort of a sense of achievement or a sense of relief or accomplishment or however people view the activity of doing something and finishing something or completing something or whatever. And for me, you know, I really see every day, the real point of my life, or my existence or whatever, is to perform. And performing can be music or talking to people, or doing in-stores or meet and greets or whatever it is. I like to be engaging with the public and fans. I like to be inspirational, I like to be inspired. I’m interested in that exchange in consuming and also providing something to consume. And sort of like whatever you need to do sort of like keep yourself in a healthy place emotionally, to be able to function and do the thing that inspires you. So for me to stay inspired and healthy enough to want to perform every single day for two hours on stage and the countless other meet and greets and radio performances and all of the things that we do every day, whatever I need to do to get through that, I try to keep that as positive as possible. Obviously lots of people use the cliche like drugs and alcohol, rock stars, or whatever. And our band, we use like yoga and I literally do snowshoeing, we’re on a Canadian tour so it’s easy to do it. We’re doing the physical activities every day, like I go out snowshoeing and we try to stay healthy. We try to, like, actually schedule in things that are quote-unquote normal, you know, for what normal people would do, and that sort of helps balance out this kind of crazy wacky world of touring and being in a different city every day, and the exhaustion that comes from being in a different environment and adjusting to that constantly, and staying up late and getting up early, and having to meet fifty thousand people. I sometimes feel like I’m a cross between like a kid in a daycare, like I meet so many other kids, every time I come home it’s almost like the parent in me is like, you know, not you, but I come in contact with so many people and I mean emotionally and physically you have to find a way to process all of that. And so it’s really amazing. I think that’s probably why Tegan and I have sort of our way of channeling and filtering what we experience in our life. That’s why we blog so much and we do videos, and I think we overprocess in some ways because we’re taking in so much energy and information constantly from people that it’s the only way I know how to spit it back out.

That’s fantastic. I can’t even stand how much I love you guys (laughs). All the sudden I’m like “they’re so great.” I have a fifteen month old daughter and I’m always looking at people that I can show her and I can say look at these women, these women are amazing, and I sincerely hope you ladies are still around playing music when she’s ready to rock and roll herself.

I hope so. Or you know, I mean it’s interesting what creating, I mean not to sound so self-important or anything, I feel like I mean this absolutely whole heartedly, but I want to be proud of whatever it is that we leave behind. Even if we’re not making music in twenty years, or we still have the luxury of having the kind amazing career that we’re having currently, I hope that’s what’s left behind, it will resonate, at least for the next generation, like one generation. To be able to see kids that are sort of like elementary school, junior high kind of age, right now getting into our project, that really excites me because I always saw our band as being impactful to my generation, to people who are now in their late twenties, early thirties. So to see us impacting another generation earlier, it really inspires me. Not in a kind of like, I don’t feel like it’s a conquest or like we must leave our mark or something like that, I genuinely hope that. It’s addictive to see yourself inspiring people or the be inspirational. I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to stop being inspirational to people. I don’t want to stop that exchange of whatever I am taking in and getting from the audience, I don’t want to give it up, and I’m wiling to keep doing whatever it is I’m doing to sort of provoke that cycle or whatever. I want to keep doing it. So I hope I’m still around too.

That would be fantastic. You know, you guys have been touring a lot. You’ve toured like crazy since you started. Are there things that you would have done differently upon looking back at the choices that y’all made when you first started to tour, to get where you are faster, or maybe perhaps to get you a different result, or is there anything else that comes to mind?

I mean I could do really nitpicky and say that there were things, but you know, for the most part, no. I feel like I was probably harder on us a few years ago. There were things I wished that we had done differently, probably from an aesthetic or like an artistic perspective, only because I think that we sort of stumbled through the first couple years of our career trying to figure out who we were and what we were, and I think I was much more impressionable and insecure about what other people would say about us and stuff like that. So I think that we started to really, really hit our stride when we stopped caring and we started looking inward again and doing what came most natural to us. So there were definitely years where I thought oh, maybe if we had done X, Y, and Z, we would have had a faster climb. But I have to be honest, I don’t envy people who sort of blow out of the gates and have perceived success or whatever people perceive a success right away on a first album or a second album. To be where we are right now, at album number six, I don’t feel like oh my god, it took us so long. I feel like, well, these are the steps that were needed. These were the years of research and development that we needed to be able to process what’s happening to us now. And I think it’s different for each person, and I always, whenever I’m talking to other bands, and whenever it’s like I’m giving advice to people or I’m just shooting the shit with other people, I really feel like each person is prepared and qualified for whatever is happening to them. Whatever is happening to you it’s for a reason. I really do believe that if Tegan and I had just came out of th gates in high school and just put out like two albums and were playing three thousand seat venues, we wouldn’t have been able to fill that space, emotionally, musically. That wasn’t our path, it just wasn’t.

Last week we played played Massey Hall in Toronto, and it’s kind of like Canada’s Carnegie Hall. It was such a big show for us. And I was really struck when we were on stage that if we had played Massey Hall when I was twenty or twenty-five or twenty-whatever, I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to absorb what an important step it was for us, but like instead of it being a career thing or like “we did it” or “I knew we could always do this, we showed them,” instead of it being this competitive thing or this achievement that, like, okay we can tick that box, last night I what really moved me was that looking at out my friends and people I’ve known since I was like thirteen years old, people we’ve worked with in our career for a decade, I mean it was almost sort of almost grotesque, how warm and loving everyone was. People just had these big smiles on their face, and I don’t cry on stage, I mean I’m not an emotional person that way, but there were countless times during the show where I was really moved where I thought, like, it’s so nice to be playing this venue now because it’s all for the right reasons, I’m so glad to just be enjoying it with everybody. I felt like it was just, I don’t know, it was the most genuine night, you know? Like it was so real and it didn’t feel like performing a show and blowing people’s minds, it just felt like we were all enjoying  it together. And I’m glad it took us ten years to play there. Like, I’m glad. It feels exactly the right time to play it.

That’s perfect. One more last question for you. As a musician, what are three top things that you would still like to do?

That’s a tough one, you know, because I feel like it’s so hard to know musically where we’ll go or where we’ll develop or how we’ll develop. I hope we never put out a record that I feel like we did for the wrong reasons or that we rushed out because we had to, because I don’t want to ever put something out that I don’t feel like is our best work, you know? People always think that what they’re doing is the most important thing that they’ve ever done, and I believe that as well, but I mean I really believe it. So I hope that we continue to put out what we believe is the best representation of where we’re at at that time. And I think that at this point, especially with the kind of audience that we’ve built and the kind of artists that we are and the kind of career that we’ve already sort of had, I hope that we’re always respectful of that without sacrificing our own artistic intentions. I don’t want to make records that I think only our audience will like, and yet I don’t want to make like a polka record just cause I get really into polka, totally alienate the fanbase that we’ve worked so hard to build. So I think it’s balancing what will push me as an artist, what will also continue to reward our own audience. I want them to be excited for each new record, and I want there to be something that they can sort of gravitate towards, or that they can sort of, like, it doesn’t always have to be their favorite album but I don’t want it to be the album that sends them running in the opposite direction. So I mean musically I hope that continues to happen, but as people I hope that the bigger our audience grows and the older we get or whatever, like, I really really mean it so sincerely when I say I want to continue to inspire people, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a gender thing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sexuality thing, I just hope that whatever we’re doing, I hope it can be inspirational to people, or just for me what was important when I was a kid was people who I thought they’re living the kind of life that acknowledges that kind of life that I’m living, or like, you know, gives me positive reinforcement about what I’m doing. And I hope that there’s something in our project or in us as people, whatever it is, the smallest detail, that I hope people can find something to relate to, even if it’s like we talk about my mom all the time, even when people come up to me and say like “Oh my god, I love when you talk about your mom cause it makes me think about my mom and we have the same kind of relationship,” even shit like that, I’m just like “perfect, sounds good.” I just love knowing that we reinforce things about people’s individual lives. It makes me feel connected somehow to people.

One last thing I just want to share this, you guys are donating the proceeds from your poster sales to benefit Haiti, am I correct?

Yes, we’re gonna donate everything that we make from, we sell a lot of merchandise, but specifically one of our easiest items to kind of donate, because they’re actually quite cheap to make, it’s not a lot of cost for Tegan and I, it’s the highest, basically it’s our lowest cost of goods, so we’re able to donate almost eighty percent of what we sell them for. So there’s two posters we’re selling for fifteen bucks, and another one for five dollars, and the audience has been amazing. We’ve telling people that we’re going to donate everything, (her phone rings) I don’t know why someone’s calling the other line, it’s so annoying…anyways we’re gonna donate everything that we earn on this whole tour. The audience has been so amazing. I know a lot of people don’t want to buy giant posters of our faces for their bedroom wall, but people are buying them (laughs) and we hope to donate, I’m hoping, in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Is that going straight to a specific charity for Haiti, or is it…

Right now we’ve decided to just split it. We were just sort of torn, the two groups, Doctors Without Borders and Partners In Health, are both groups that I think that are doing amazing things and are both on the ground right now in Haiti, so we’re gonna divide the funds evenly between the two.

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One of my favorite things about interviewing musicians is the fact that I get to find out all about their tech. Those conversations are some of my favorites, but I have to say that during this interview, I absolutely forgot! I got so caught up with our conversation, that many questions were left out. Although from careful observation, it seems to me that there are some Macs involved, especially in the creation of their awesome videos

Learn more at TeganAndSara.com • iTunes • MySpace • Twitter • Facebook