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Banding together
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“We really get around these days,” says Sara Quin, commenting on Tegan and Sara’s recent cameos on other people’s records. “We’re like the Santana of guest vocalists.” The identical twin sisters from Calgary, now based in Vancouver (Tegan) and Montreal (Sara—though she’s planning to return to the West Coast), couldn’t be accused of spreading themselves too thin, having just released their sixth album, Sainthood, and embarked on another North American tour. But they’ve also made time for a number of other artists, ones outside their pop/rock comfort zone. Sara was inspired by the ease with which major musicians used to collaborate and pen songs for each other, as witnessed in the archival footage that makes up much of the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream. “I was trying to imagine current artists doing that for each other, but there’s something so territorial now,” she says. “Does it take away the value from your project if you can’t hack it yourself? It’s such an important thing for me and Tegan, especially as women in this industry, that we are the songwriters and these are our ideas.” The itch to experiment with collaboration was initially scratched with a session in New Orleans where, for the first time, Tegan and Sara wrote songs together. “It was amazing,” Sara reports. “It was like sitting in front of a mirror watching her watch me while I was writing a song. It suddenly gave me a completely different perspective on what I do, and watching her write music made me understand how she writes a song, and that can be so hard to articulate in words.” Although one co-written song made it onto Sainthood, the New Orleans experiment isn’t something that’s likely to be repeated. “It’s pretty stressful,” Sara says, “and if I removed songwriting as my only independent sport, I feel like I may go crazy.” Instead, they teamed up and turned to other artists to get their collaboration on, a move that provided the sisters with “mediation.” “Tegan and I don’t dip into that friction when there’s a grown-up there. It’s like, ‘Don’t do anything embarrassing in front of Margaret Cho.’” Said comedian, who’s working with a variety of artists on an upcoming album, enlisted Tegan and Sara to put music to her lyrics. They also joined in on the latest all-star cover of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” orchestrated by Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham as a benefit for Native women’s rights groups, and they cut the track “Feel It in My Bones” with techno DJ Tiësto, who’d remixed their tune “Back in Your Head” and invited them to sing it during his 2 a.m. set at the Bonaroo festival in 2008, a gig Sara calls “the most rewarding live experience I’ve ever had.” “The crowd was insane!” Sara reports. “I thought to myself, we really made a mistake becoming a rock band because this is what I wanna do. It’s such a different energy. Normally, I always feel as if we’re teetering on the edge of losing an audience. If you say something wrong or a song goes badly or the set list isn’t right or the energy isn’t right, you can really lose control of a room. But there was something so incredible and energetic about getting on a stage where people aren’t thinking, ‘Entertain me,’ they’re thinking, ‘ENTERTAIN ME!’” WITH AN HORSE AT PLACE DES ARTS |
