Interviews
"Tegan and Sara speak out about gay rights, the risks of being out while shaping their career in the music industry, and the influence they have on fans."
We did that big American tour last fall, and I say it started around there. We didn't tour a ton in the summer, so for me, that's when I started to write for The Con-I'm sorry, for this new record. So the first few songs kinda came out before that tour, and then the rest came around Christmas and then into the spring. We started pre-production in March, so most of the stuff that I wrote was during that time. Sara and I flew to New Orleans in November, and we wrote together, which is when we wrote the song "Sainthood," which is what inspired this record. It's not actually on the record, but it's the song that sort of inspired us to get working on a new record. We've never written together. In 14 years, we've never sat down in a room together, until we decided that now was the time. So we went and wrote seven songs together, which was really weird. The title track "Sainthood" was really great, but the rest of it was just really strange. I think Sara and I need to be alone to balance ourselves [laughs], like we came up with really weird music. I'm sure it will see the light of day at some point. With the way the music biz is now, you always have to have B-sides and extras.
Anyway, it was a really fascinating experience and, when we release the record, we're releasing books with the record, I mean, at the same time, and one of the books is about our trip there. We brought a photographer and we taped everything that we did, and it sort of looks at the experience of sitting down together for the first time and writing. It was really exciting. Sara had been getting into Tom Petty and had watched the documentary that came out about him last year [Peter Bogdanovich's Runnin' Down a Dream], and Sara was like, "Everybody writes together! Everybody from that era wrote together. We should write together." And I was like, "We are not Tom Petty!" But it was great. It was a really cool experience. And again, that's sort of when we really started to get inspired and write a lot of music.
So how many of those seven songs are on the album?
Zero. [Laughs] But one of them, "Sainthood," I think we'll play it live. It used some Leonard Cohen lyrics, and they didn't approve it. It's sort of like this weird world where, if you want to play that song and record it, you can have it, but you can't pillage from a song. We were like, "OK." We're still going to play it live and it will be a part of the folklore of this record. Literally, we had 51 songs, so it just got whittled down and the best songs won. There are two songs on the record that we wrote together, but not in New Orleans, which will be the first time we've ever written anything together and it got on a record. So that's really exciting, and they're weird songs, which is great. [Laughs]"
Tegan & Sara in Amsterdam - audio interview for toazted.com in 2005.
Tegan and Sara on This Just Out with Liz Feldman.
Part I.
Part II.
