To mark their tenth album Crybaby and their heartfelt new TV show based on their memoir of growing up queer in the ‘90s, Tegan and Sara take Alan Pedder on a nostalgia trip through the key songs and stories of their lives.
Tegan and Sara have always wanted to be seen. Seen as in understood, not necessarily as in famous.
It’s a path that the twins have been following since their high school days in Calgary, when they wrote their first songs on an old acoustic guitar belonging to their mother’s boyfriend. Just as importantly, they’ve always wanted their audience to feel seen. Figuratively, in the scores of songs they’ve recorded to date, and literally, in the case of their 2019 memoir High School, which featured a mirror-like cover.
Released last month, their tenth album Crybaby is as generous and open as ever. Financed themselves after leaving both their long-time management and major-label backers during the pandemic, it marks the twins’ first properly indie release in more than 20 years. It also marks the first time that the pair have collaborated intimately on every song, empowered to give each other honest feedback where before they might have softened their stance.
The result is something deliberately scrappier than anything they’ve released in the past 10 years, roughing up what remains of their leftfield pop ambitions with some surprising sonic curveballs. Intentionally loose, it’s an album designed to come to life on stage, to allow a bit more spontaneity back into the Tegan and Sara experience.
When Best Fit sits down with them over Zoom – first Tegan and then Sara, since they prefer to be interviewed separately – they’re in LA rehearsing for a month-long North American tour. It’s been a big week for the twins, with the Clea DuVall-created TV adaptation of their memoir debuting on Amazon Freevee a few days earlier, bringing the past few years of nostalgising to a heartwarming close just before the arrival of Crybaby, and they're feeling good.
Scanning the twins' Nine Songs list – four each, and one we asked them to choose together – the first thing to notice is that most were released in 1993 or 1994, when they were in what UK schools call Year 9, a time that predates but strongly influences the years covered by their memoir. At least one pivotal song here ("Today" by Smashing Pumpkins) appears prominently in the TV adaptation, at the start of episode three.
“Sara and I are not really list people,” says Tegan at the beginning of our chat. “But I do find that, over the last 10 years, a lot of press promotion has progressively become about making playlists for people. So honestly, for me, making this list was actually really easy. I just picked the songs that really influenced me as a teenager, and I think Sara mostly did the same."
The oldest song, then, is a Sinéad O’Connor masterpiece from 1987 that was loved by both their parents, while the most recent is an Alicia Keys synth ballad that helped the twins embrace the pop era they embarked on with 2013’s still-excellent Heartthrob.
"I do think Tegan and I stepped into that game before a lot of other people did, before it became cool for indie and outsider artists to make pop music," says Sara. "Alicia Keys was one of a handful of artists at that time who were making pop music that really excited me, and I think you can hear some of that influence in the production of Heartthrob. We wanted to sort of marry that pop sound with dark minor melodies and strange drone sounds, to just be a bit funky and weird and discordant."
Read on to find out which song Sara hated on first listen, and what Tegan really thinks of the twins' first two albums.
“Late At Night” by Buffalo Tom
BEST FIT: We're roughly the same age so I’m going to guess that you discovered this song through My So Called Life. Is that right?
TEGAN QUIN: Exactly right, and that’s why I put it on the list. When we went out with Clea DuVall and pitched our TV show, people would ask us what kind of show we were trying to make and we said “a queer version of My So Called Life.” Which was itself actually pretty queer for its time.
One thing we always talked about was how integral and significant the music was to that show. Not just because it had the big bands of the time like The Cranberries, but also featured unknown bands. At least, certainly as Calgarians, bands that were unknown to us, like Buffalo Tom.
And I think those days were probably around the time I started to go out. I was in eighth grade, and my friends and I would go to the movies without our parents. Every movie I’d see, I always wanted to know what was on the soundtrack. What were the bands? For us, that was the coolest thing to do, and I want people to do that for our show.
What is that you love about this song?
TEGAN QUIN: Gosh, it’s just so great. The whole record that song comes from is so good, and even though it sounds so of its time in some ways it doesn’t sound that dated to me. It’s weird. Like, if someone played this for me now and said, ‘Yeah, there’s this new band called Buffalo Tom, they’re pretty cool,’ I’d probably believe them.
Melody is really important to me, and I think the melodic elements on the album are really cool. But, yeah, I think I will forever just associate it with those high school days and the feelings of missed opportunity and longing that were in the show.
From what I remember, this song was the soundtrack to the moment where Jordan and Angela finally went public with their relationship.
TEGAN QUIN: Yeah, but there was still so much heartbreak in it. You just knew it wasn't gonna work out. It was a great use of the song. You know, we’ve had our music used in movies before and sometimes it’s just, yeah, whatever. But when a song is used well, when it’s used right, then it just becomes this beautiful moment. Whenever I think of Jordan and Angela together, this is the song that I think of. This is their love song.
Was Sara also super into it?
TEGAN QUIN: Maybe it's a weird thing to admit but we were both so obsessed with My So Called Life. We’ve watched every episode a million times.
It’s funny, actually, because when the show was first aired in Canada the mid-season Halloween episode was pre-empted by something else and wasn’t shown. We had no idea. Like, it was the ‘90s, how could we have known? So when My So Called Life re-aired about a year and a half later, it was this really weird moment.
I was on something for the first time, hanging out at our friend's house, and I was completely out of my fucking mind. I kept running out of the house and Sara and our friends had to sort of wrangle me and pull me back in. I just wanted to be outside so badly. They eventually forced me to sit down on the couch and they put the TV on, and this Halloween episode of My So Called Life came on. Everyone in the room was like, ‘What is this?’
It was as if we were seeing an episode that had been made just for us in that moment because it had never aired in Canada. I’ll never forget me and my friend holding each other and being, like, a foot away from the screen weeping at this episode. I just frickin' loved that show.
“What's Up?” by 4 Non Blondes
BEST FIT: This is a song I always want to do at karaoke until I’m about 30 seconds in and realise how incredibly hard it is to sing.
TEGAN QUIN: [laughing] Yeah, it’s really not a good idea to try and sing that.
If my memory serves me correctly, this song must have come out in ’94, or at least that was when it became really significant to us. We were in our teenage years, and we spent the entire summer listening to this song. My mom and her boyfriend had this jukebox that our grandfather had reconditioned. It was an old Wurlitzer that he had adapted to use with CDs. We used to go and punch the number for the 4 Non Blondes album and we would just play this fucking song over and over again. We must have listened to it thousands of times a day.
Sara and I had no real structure to our lives in the summers. Our parents worked full-time, so we’d just stay home all day and play the card game rummy with our best friend Courtney Greenwell. We were obsessed with that game. And Courtney had a really great voice. Like, she could just belt that song out while we were playing cards. She was so good, we used to make her sing for us. We hadn’t started the band yet and I remember watching her with such envy that she could sing “What’s Up?”. I just loved the song. It invoked so much emotion in me, and I didn’t know why.
We grew up with a mum who loved people like Sinéad O’Connor and Tori Amos, so we had a big respect for female voices. But I don’t think we even knew who Linda Perry was – this was before the internet – or what she looked like. She was just this vocal powerhouse. I remember the first time when we eventually saw the music video for "What's Up?" and we were flipping out because she was there wearing that huge hat. We were like, wow, she’s so cool.
Did you and Sara ended up meeting Linda Perry at some point?
TEGAN QUIN: Yes, I think it was in 2009, at a show of ours that we did at a cool venue called The Glass House, in a place called Pomona, just outside of LA. A lot of bands play The Glass House before they play Coachella, so this was our warm-up show for the festival, and Linda Perry was there. She was a total fucking character. A badass.
Leisha Hailey was there too. She played Alice in The L Word and was in a band called The Murmurs, who Sara and I grew up listening to and were obsessed with. It was also my first time meeting Clea DuVall, who I love so much.
As you can imagine, as a queer person, to have Linda Perry, Leisha Hailey and Clea DuVall at our show was pretty mindblowing. I don’t even know how we managed to play the show.
“What’s Up” is quite a divisive song and has a few famous haters, including Linda Perry, who’s said she hates how the 4 Non Blondes album ended up being produced and sort of disowned the whole thing.
TEGAN QUIN: Oh, interesting! I do get that in a way, though. There's a small but very vocal portion of our audience who are freaks for our first two albums, but to me, they just don’t sound like who we are because at that time we hadn’t figured out how to record ourselves.
I have to be very clear here, because I love the two people who made those albums with us – one was Hawksley Workman and one was Jared Kuemper, who are great producers. Objectively, the records are totally fine, but to me they are unlistenable because we hadn’t figured out who we were yet.
I feel like you can’t really hear us in those songs, and it’s not the producers’ fault. It wasn’t until our third album that we really figured out how we wanted to sound. So when that small percentage of people constantly say, ‘Those are your best records!’, I’m like, yeah, they are really, really not.
“Ordinary World” by Duran Duran
TEGAN QUIN: Our parents loved music so much. Our mum was only 21 when she had us, so they were still so young and played music in the house all the time when we were growing up. They were the ones who introduced Duran Duran to us, but that’s not why I feel attached to it.
I think I was 13, and I had my first pre-puberty crush on a girl who also happened to be my best friend. I was obsessed with her. She was just so cool and amazing and so popular, whereas Sara and I were kinda weird.
I mean, because we were twins, the popular kids liked to hang out with us, and this girl really wanted to be – not my best friend – but our best friend. Kind of like we were an accessory. And I don’t mean that in a mean way. I’m still friends with this girl to this day, and I love her.
I remember the first time she invited us for a sleepover without all our other friends. It was summer and it was hot, and she was hot, so tall and lanky and tanned. I remember Sara and I running home, we were so excited. After our mum said we could go to the sleepover, I remember plopping down on my bed and putting on “Ordinary World” and listening to it, like, five times in a row thinking ‘I’m in love with my best friend.’
BEST FIT: That’s beautiful. And kinda interesting, because the song was written by Simon LeBon about his best friend who died. But of course the lyrics are so open to interpretation.
TEGAN QUIN: Yeah, and that, to me, is the gift of music. A great song is a song that you can connect with and make it about anything you want. Like, what the hell did I have in common with Duran Duran at 13 years old? We had no access to anything to know what the song was about or who the band were, so ultimately it just became about this feeling that I had.
Would you say that there was a Duran Duran influence on your album Love You to Death?
TEGAN QUIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Heartthrob, the album before that, was our attempt at making a cool but straight-up pop record. Like, really fucking balls-to-the-wall going for it. But then after two and a half years of touring it and venturing into the jungle of the pop world, we were exhausted. We were like, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ but we were still super interested in pop production.
When we made Love You to Death, we wanted to make a dark dance-pop bedroom record, and Duran Duran was a big part of the palette of influences we were drawing from.
“About A Girl” by Nirvana
BEST FIT: Firstly, I have to ask, is it the version from Bleach or the version from MTV Unplugged that you want on your list?
TEGAN QUIN: I’m so glad you asked because the version that changed my life was the one from MTV Unplugged.
I had everything Nirvana had ever put out, including a bunch of bootlegs that people had recorded in Seattle and sold on cassette tapes in a record store in Calgary, but that record – specifically the song “About A Girl” – was kind of my justification to my parents and other friends who didn’t like Nirvana. It was the justification for me that they were really great. Just amazing performers and songwriters.
I think the MTV Unplugged record came out around the time I was starting to become a songwriter, and there was just something about this song that really resonated with me at that moment in my life. I must have watched the concert and listened to the recording thousands of times. It was a huge, huge influence on me.
Which Nirvana record was your entry point?
TEGAN QUIN: It was Nevermind, of course, because “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was so huge, but I came to it pretty late in the game. I guess in 1993, when In Utero was almost out. But yeah, I was only 14 when Kurt Cobain died, so I was really young when Nevermind came out in 1991.
In Utero is my favourite of their albums.
I read that Kurt Cobain was nervous about putting “About A Girl” on Bleach because it sounded so different from the rest of the album. Is that a feeling you can relate to when it comes to taking risks on your records?
TEGAN QUIN: As a teenager, I was so obsessed with Kurt. I loved the way he talked about music and about taking risks in the studio. And, you know, he was sort of down on himself, but he spoke in a way that it was just so clear that he felt so compulsive about writing and playing music, like it was something he needed to expel from himself.
I really related to that, especially as a young songwriter. I felt like I was writing about all the things I couldn’t say. So yeah, his fears and his nervousness was something that really resonated with me, because he did all that he did anyway. There was a bravery to it all.
“Troy” by Sinéad O'Connor
BEST FIT: When we asked you to choose one song together was “Troy” an immediately obvious choice?
SARA QUIN: If I'm being completely honest, Tegan picked it and I didn't get a choice. But I’m happy, and I think it really could have been any song from those early Sinéad O’Connor albums.
I know you’ve talked about Sinéad O’Connor before and how much your parents were into her music when you were kids. Can you dive into that a bit more?
SARA QUIN: Yeah, it’s interesting because our parents had very different vibes. Our mum and stepdad had their specific vibe, and our dad – our biological dad – had his. He was into what I would now sort of classify as more cerebral, more complicated music. At home with our mom and stepdad it would be people like Bruce Springsteen and U2 and Cyndi Lauper. More anthemic, more pop. But Sinéad O’Connor was someone who was played in both houses.
TEGAN QUIN: I think our mum resonated with that music because Sinéad O’Connor was angry and opinionated, and our mum was at the time really finding her own voice.
You know, after our parents divorced, she went back to school and became a social worker and started to hang out more with other young women. So I think the palpable rage and frustration and politics of Sinéad O’Connor’s music really resonated in our household, and especially “Troy”.
She would almost torture us with that song, putting it on so loud in the van when she came to pick us and our friends up from wherever we had been. I have these vivid memories of the boys that we hung out with plugging their ears and shouting, “Sonia, turn it down!”, but she would just scream along.
The other day I was talking to my best friend, who ended up being my first girlfriend in high school, and she said that one of her earliest and most favourite memories of becoming friends was coming over to our house and how our mum would blast Sinéad O’Connor. We’d listen to “Troy” every Saturday, like ten times. We would clean the house and just be screaming the song at the top of our lungs.
SARA QUIN: My memory of first hearing “Troy” was on a drive through the Rocky Mountains, going home to Calgary from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, which was where our stepdad’s family lived.
It’s a long drive, really terrifically long. We’d start early in the morning and it would take us 14 hours or something to get home. During the daytime, you could see these spectacular views of the craziest mountains you’ve ever seen, but then at night it was really spooky, especially as a kid, knowing that even though you couldn’t see them in the dark there were these death-defying cliff edges out there, just to the right of the car. That would cause me all kinds of anxiety. And I remember our mum playing this super intense Sinéad O’Connor song and it made a really deep impression on me.
When we got home, I remember taking the cassette tape out of the car and playing that song over and over again after our parents had gone to bed. I think the standout for me was probably just how ferocious and angry she sounds in the song. I don’t think I’d ever really heard a woman sing like that, at eight or nine years old. I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, she’s very upset.’
I recently watched the Sinéad O’Connor documentary that just came out, and what I did not know was all the stuff in the film about her mother. Her mother was very abusive and used to lock her out of the house in the cold overnight, and “Troy” is sort of an artefact of that very tumultuous and traumatising relationship.
Knowing what I know now, it’s interesting to think about our dad’s connection to Sinéad O’Connor. As a child, it made so much more sense that our mum loved her music, but it was a curiosity to me that he loved it too. I never picked up on it then, nor would I have known how to navigate that kind of conversation, but I do think there was something in the music, some kind of narrative, that really connected with him.
You know, he had quite a difficult relationship with his mother as a child, and eventually he was surrendered to foster care and he’s really had no contact with her ever since. So there are some parallels with Sinéad O’Connor, not just in her difficult relationship with her mother but also in her violent and difficult upbringing in the church. My dad grew up in the system and spent a great deal of time with priests and nuns after his mum disappeared, and he’s been so troubled by the church.
There’s so much of that in Sinéad O’Connor’s music. I never picked up on that as a child but now I can really pick up on it.
“Today” by Smashing Pumpkins
SARA QUIN: I heard this song for the first time in junior high, when I was just finding my identity as an alternative kid. I had definitely started to understand that my sexuality wasn’t straightforward. But I didn’t necessarily know that I liked girls at that point, which I think was in eighth grade.
There was a boy who was a bit older than me who everybody loved. He was a skateboarder guy, very cool, and he hung out with all the coolest skateboarder girls. They weren’t the popular kids but they were cool. Like, nobody gave them any shit. Anyway, he took a liking to me and I was confused by that, because on the one hand it was terrific – he was this really beautiful guy who was sensitive and I worshipped him – but on the other hand, in retrospect, I just really wanted to be him.
He was really into Smashing Pumpkins and gave me a copy of Siamese Dream, and he told Tegan and I to start the record on track three. It sounds so cliché but it was as if my life was divided into before I heard “Today” and after I heard “Today”. Like, I truly felt my whole world shift in a way that can only happen, I think, when you’re a teenager. You hear something and you're like, ‘This is who I am now, this represents me. This music is everything that I can’t say and it’s everything that I feel.’
That dynamic shift from a quiet beginning to an explosive ending was something I had never heard before. Obviously it became such a signature of alternative music in the ‘90s, but that was my introduction to it and it just totally changed my life.
BEST FIT: I read that you were once, and maybe still are, able to sing the whole of Siamese Dream, including the guitar solos, a cappella.
SARA QUIN: [laughing] I could not do it now. But I do feel like if I have a couple of days to re-familiarise myself with it then I probably could. I feel like it’s a muscle memory thing for me.
When we started writing our memoir a few years ago, I made a playlist of songs that I would listen to, and it really reminded me of the time when Smashing Pumpkins was the soundtrack of my life. I don’t think I have ever spent as much time scrutinising a record as I did with Siamese Dream. I know the corners of every song in a way that I will never have the time to ever do again, even with our own albums.
“Drinking in LA” by Bran Van 3000
BEST FIT: Speaking of the memoir, this was one of the songs that you included on the classic ‘90s playlist that you made to go with the book. What is your connection with it?
SARA QUIN: This song came out when we were right at the end of our high school experience, when I was absolutely in love – infatuated – with this girl. She was a modern dancer and she’d go to LA every summer to dance. I had no idea of what LA was like. To me, she might as well have been getting on a space shuttle. Like, this was a place so unreachable, so outside of my experience of life. And that just intensified the longing. It was like she had this mysterious artistic life that she was leading.
“Drinking in LA” wasn’t even necessarily a song that I liked, or was representative musically of what I was into at the time. But when it came on the radio I would feel this unbearable tension and longing for this girl. It was almost like I was jealous of LA, because the city was like a person that she loved. When I would hear this song I would feel this kind of inadequacy. Like, what about me and Calgary could ever possibly compete with the life that this girl was living?
So this song is a weird one. It’s not music that made me feel good about love or anything, but it was the first time that I realised I was going to have to grow up and get out of Calgary and go to a place like LA.
You're in LA now. How do you feel about the city these days, in 2022?
SARA QUIN: You know, I’ve always had such a love–hate relationship with this place. When we first started coming here with the band, I still had that feeling of it being so big and representative of so many things that I was not. I felt that it was not for me: the car culture, the beauty standards and all that crap.
When I did leave Calgary I was drawn to places like Montreal, where I lived for a significant number of years, and eventually to New York. Those cities were more my vibe, not LA. But over the years, I’ve come to experience LA as a place where there’s enough space and creative people to be somewhere I can imagine make music. Like, I do not make music in New York or in Montreal. We always make our albums in LA.
Through that, I’ve been able to sort of reconcile my feelings about LA, but I’m still so sensitive about all that driving around in cars. I just like to be on my feet, you know?
“Fuck The Pain Away” by Peaches
SARA QUIN: This song was monumental to me when I moved to Montreal when I was 23. I didn’t know anybody. I just had the email address of this random guy Antoine who had given me his contact information after a show we did opening up for Rufus Wainwright. This was really early on in our career where we were still a small enough band that you could just hang out at the merch table and meet people. We didn’t think of them as fans but as potential friends, and we met people that way all the time.
So, I took this guy’s information and maybe about a year later I emailed him and told him I was moving to Montreal. It was February the week I moved there and it was fucking freezing, the kind of cold where you know that if you stay out too long you’ll actually fucking die. Anyway, we began to hang out and go out for dinner, but I started to get the sense that maybe those dinners were like dates or something. I don’t know that to be true, and he seemed really cool and sweet, but after nine days or so I knew I had to just be straight up with him.
I asked him if he knew any gay people and he said, ‘Actually I’m in art school with a girl and I think you’d really like her,’ and he took me over to introduce me to her. Her place was in a brownstone, kind of like in New York, and we climbed all the stairs up to the top apartment, and when we got inside there was what sounded to me like a horrible racket. The kind of music where you’re like, ‘What in the fuck is this?’.
Then this girl comes around the corner and I was immediately kind of intimidated, because she was clearly gay and super cute. She took us into the living room and gave us a beer and then went to get ready because we were going to go to some kind of lesbian Meow Mix kind of event. I’ll never forget Antoine and I just looking at each other and I was like, ‘This song, right? Crazy!’ and it was “Fuck The Pain Away” by Peaches.
Anyway, the end of that story is that I ended up dating that girl and she became our band’s art director, and has been our art director for almost 20 years. She absolutely fucking loved Peaches. I was so not ready for that electroclash sound at the time, but because I desperately wanted to be cool and I thought she was the coolest person in the world, I started to love everything that she loved. And so I became obsessed with Peaches too.
I got to see her on the Teaches of Peaches Tour and it remains, to this day, one of the greatest shows I've ever seen. During “Fuck The Pain Away” she brought a guy on stage to sing with her, and he was so profoundly good. The crowd went so bananas. I’ve never seen anything like it. People started taking their clothes off and throwing them on stage. Like, they were in states of undress that I’d never seen before.
And Peaches, she grabbed the guy in a sort of wrestling move and held him down on stage and started making out with him. I mean, you’d probably get cancelled for doing that these days, but I remember being like, ‘Wow, this is truly the greatest spectacle I’ve ever fucking seen.’
She's the fucking best. I have nothing but respect for her.
“Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart” by Alicia Keys
SARA QUIN: I don’t really have a favourite popstar, but for me Alicia Keys is up there as someone who was doing something trickier and more unusual than I think people give her credit for. This particular song and the whole Element of Freedom album was influential for me because it made our band transitioning into the pop world a little easier for me.
Around the time of our album Sainthood I was feeling like I wanted to be in a weird, cerebral art-rock band and Tegan was pulling me in a different direction. It felt like we had hit a ceiling. It sort of felt, operationally, like our band was never going to get bigger, like we were never going to be cool. So I was like, ‘Fuck this then, I want to do something different.’
I remember hearing this Alicia Keys song and, without meaning to sound egotistical, it really felt like the kind of song that I could write, or that we could write. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this song and trying to understand what it was that really tickled me about it.
BEST FIT: It's funny you say that, because I listened to it last night for the first time in a few years, and I was surprised because it really does sound, as you say, like a song that you and Tegan could have written.
SARA QUIN: I’ve actually tried to cover this song. On my own, at a night put on by this guy called Thomas Bartlett, who’s a great musician who has played with everybody. He puts on these shows at Le Poisson Rouge in New York where he invites a bunch of musicians, almost like a friends and family type thing, and he would play piano and have other people sit in on bass or guitar and sing or whatever. We were friends at the time and he was kind of always bugging me to do come and join in, but I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be there with all those really excellent musicians.
Eventually I did go and we tried to do “Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart”, and honestly I don’t think I did a good job. It’s a really unusual song, and I think Alicia Keys is such a tremendous singer. What’s probably very natural for her voice is not necessarily natural for my voice. So, while spiritually I feel like I connect with the song, I don’t know if I can really pull it off. I remember coming off stage with Thomas and being like, ‘That was awful.’
Do you have any other memories associated with the song?
SARA QUIN: Um, well I was really heartbroken when I first heard it. I mean, I wasn’t in the acute stage of heartbreak, I was in the stage where you feel like you’re never going to get over someone and all your friends are like, ‘Please don’t talk about her anymore.’ They were like, ‘Get over it!’, but I couldn’t because there was no other face I wanted to look at more.
So yeah, I was in a very preoccupied but functional stage of a breakup – and I don’t even know if it was really a breakup – and I honestly felt sleepless. Like I was trying to sleep with a broken heart and I just couldn’t. It was devastating to me that I just couldn’t get over this woman, and just being in that isolating period when the time of people being empathetic is over and nobody wants to hear about it anymore.
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