INTERVIEW: Tegan and Sara

The prolific indie pop duo will perform at Cain's Ballroom on Monday

Armed with a synth-y new album and a US tour lineup, Tegan & Sara will stop by Tulsa for a show at Cain’s Ballroom on Monday, September 19. Released this past June, Love You To Death is the duo’s eighth studio album. The record, which is the twins’ most pop-forward sound to date, beckons to classic Cyndi Lauper and dance-ready Whitney Houston. We recently chatted with Sara Quin about the new album, “adventure touring,” and what it’s like to play the role of artist-turned-activist.

TTV: How’s your day going?

Sara: Usually when we’re gearing up for a tour, we’re in rehearsals from about 11 until 7 p.m., so mornings are kind of pressed. We’d be at hotels or Airbnbs without the comforts of home. Right now, I’m catching up on e-mails, playing with the cat. It’s pretty domestic. I can’t complain.

TTV: Sounds nice! When do you hit the road for your next tour?

Sara: We leave on Tuesday morning, so a couple more days at home and then we go up to Canada and start making our way through Washington State. It’s a pretty civilized tour schedule—for us anyway.

We’re pretty much doing the same places we’ve always done, but it’s great—especially for me as a Canadian. The United States has become like a second home to us when we tour. We spend most of our time touring places like Tulsa. Last night at dinner, my [American] friends said, “It’s so weird: as Americans, we don’t know anything about St. Louis or Baltimore or Kansas City, but those are places you’ve been dozens of times, that most Americans will never go to.”

And it’s true. I feel really lucky because we’ve visited places enough times now that when I go to these places, I know where I want to get coffee, where I want to eat, where I want to shop. It’s nice. I feel like I get to go on this fun summer tour every year.

The good thing is that other parts of our career let us explore new places, when we can go and do what we like to call “adventure touring” (laughs). Every couple years, we want to take on a new part of the world where we can put in a little time and energy into growing our audience. But the way we do that is by having a career like we do here in the United States.

TTV: What is it like as an English-speaking artist to go play shows in a country where you don’t speak the language?

Sara: The truth of it is that a lot of times in those places, the audience has found us because they have at least a basic understanding of English as a second language. Maybe they have a parent who speaks English, or they’ve spent time in college in the States or in Europe. I don’t know that we’re breaking into the full-on non-English speaking bucket.

I also think that for us, internationally, especially in places like Southeast Asia, we’re not getting mainstream radio play or media or television. We have a foundation because of the Internet and then also because we’re part of the LGBT community. I think a lot of people internationally—especially in countries where there’s still real difficulty in being out publicly, where there’s not a lot of support socially and from the government—a lot of people look for community online, and look for bands and film and television that can sort of represent them. And we happen to be one of a couple dozen bands and artists that are out and travel in their countries. I mean, I hope they like our music, but I also think they’re there because it’s a community, that they know they can come and be part of it and feel safe.

TTV: You and Tegan have built a reputation of political activism and social responsibility. Is that something you hoped to do when you were starting out? How do you understand your role in that world?

Sara: It’s always evolving. I would be lying if I said that it was something we talked about doing. We were 17 when we started our music career. I wasn’t even out. I came out when I was eighteen. I was just graduating from high school, and I really found no reason to compartmentalize my personal life from my professional life at that time.

Right from the first album, the questions we would get from press would be, “oh, what do your gay friends think? Are you writing these love songs about them?” And I was like, “seriously?” In my mind, I had no clue if we were going to have a career. I was eighteen and doing press, but I already knew that even if we only put out one record, I was not going to answer these questions lying. I was not gonna be like, “my boyfriend? Oh he loves it.”

It felt so honest and natural. I know that isn’t the place that everyone naturally goes to, but for me it was, and it stuck. Being honest turned into a very long career of trying to figure out exactly where our identity belonged in the narrative conversation about my music, and I think if we were starting our music career today, I would have a very different perspective. But we were starting our career when it was completely commonplace and expected for journalists to be super homophobic and misogynistic. I really feel like we’ve always battled—even within our own community—[people not knowing] how to label us, how to talk about us, how to write about us, and I think that we just felt motivated to be a part of shaping that.

We wanted to usher the stage through quickly so that we could just get down to business, but now things have changed. And we’re not gonna just be like, oh, good, that work is all done. The work isn’t done. Around the world, it’s really shit for the LGBT kids. In America, just because you’re a musician or an actor and everybody’s all cool with you being gay, doesn’t mean that if you’re a kid living in Kansas City in the suburbs going through 9^th grade that it’s cool.

So how do we use our visibility as queer artists to help other people? How do we motivate legislative change and social change? That all sort of stems from being asked, “what do your boyfriends think of your songs?” We really didn’t get into it thinking we were political. I was just like, “I am not going to answer a question about my boyfriend for the rest of my life. It’s just not gonna happen.”

And I’m right there with this new crop of young artists who are talking about being gay. For them, they’re like, “oh my God, does it have to be all about my identity?” I spent a lot of years saying things like, “well I don’t want to have to talk about this,” or, “I’m more than this.” … Now I’m going through a phase where … I am super happy and excited to be gay, and I like talking about it, and I feel like it’s cool and it’s interesting and I don’t want to have to pretend I’m just like all the straight people out there. It took me a long time to get to a place where I feel like I don’t have to apologize for my identity.

So I don’t know. We’ve really done a 180 but you know, maybe that’s just getting older and not caring what people think as much.

TTV: On your new record, “White Knuckles” talks about you and Tegan’s partnership. As a twin, what’s it like to share so much of your identity with a person, and then build a shared artistic identity with them?

Sara: It’s all I’ve ever known. So, sometimes it can kind of complicated, but I don’t have the experience of other siblings, or of being in a band with anyone else. I guess that I just feel really lucky because in a way, there’s something so unconditional about it. Tegan and I can have a terrible fight, and we can have stretches of years where maybe we’re not even that close, but there’s something so unconditional about our love and our commitment as family and as collaborators on this project.

TTV: Some fans have criticized Tegan and Sara’s new focus on pop music. Has moving toward more of a pop sound on Love You to Death given you more freedom to create the kind of music you want?

Sara: You know, I’ve never felt beholden to any one type of sound when I’m making records. When you ask some of our diehard fans what their favorite record is, they would tell you it was So Jealous or The Con, and we received just as much negative feedback from people who wanted us to sound like our earlier records when we made those. I remember when we put So Jealous out, a lot of our diehard fans were like, “why did you add all those keyboards and synth in there?” I guess if you’re looking for people to give you feedback that you don’t want to hear, you’re always gonna find it.

We told ourselves that the goal is not to make music that we think the fan base is going to like. We just make music and we try to be honest, write songs that we believe in, and challenge ourselves creatively.

And really, I think it’s less about what the music sounds like, and more about what people think pop means in terms of what it means the band is, or who we are as people. I think people worried that pop meant that we weren’t going to be us anymore … I think it’s really sweet, actually, and Tegan and I have done everything we can to show people that maybe the music sounds a bit different, but we are the same as we’ve always been.