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Jan 05, 2010 By Chris Tinkham Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

Tegan and Sara Quin are sitting together in the artists lounge at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank when they’re pitched a fantasy film premise: It’s the year 1999, and the fledgling recording artists have self-released their first album of acoustic guitar-driven songs as Sara and Tegan. An envoy from the year 2009 has traveled through time to bring the Calgary natives an artifact from the future, a Tegan and Sara CD consisting of taut punk-electro-pop tracks titled Sainthood. How do the 19-year-old sisters react?

“I would have freaked the fuck out,” Tegan says. “I would have been stoked.”

“In 1999, probably until we released So Jealous in 2004, I was pretty sure that we weren’t going to make it as a band,” Sara says. “It was terrifying. It was really hard and it was disorienting. You really relied on press and you really relied on reviews, and we weren’t a well-reviewed band at that time. There wasn’t a ton of support that way. It was very organic, it was very grassroots. And I was tired.

As of one record, I was already pooped. I would literally come off tour and print out university application forms and be like, ‘OK, this is a serious alternative plan. Like, I really have a plan B, don’t freak out.’ So, I think, regardless of what kind of music we make, or how things have changed, or the level of success monetarily or emotionally, I would just be thrilled that we had managed to make it 10 years.”

“I’d be really proud of us for stepping it up,” Tegan says. “I feel like people have always applauded us for ‘you guys are so funny; aw, you’re so cute, you’re so interesting, you’re so charismatic, you write really great songs.’ But no one ever has said, ‘Wow, you guys are really good musicians.’ And I think we are, and I’m really excited, ‘cause I think this record reflects that.”

Prior to So Jealous, Tegan and Sara’s reputation and fanbase had been built largely on persistent touring, but that album’s catchy single “Walking With a Ghost” boosted their recognition when it became a radio hit, and soon after was covered by The White Stripes. Tegan and Sara’s instrumentally dense and thematically sophisticated 2007 album The Con, co-
produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, marked an artistic breakthrough for the duo, with technology allowing the sisters to collaborate on pre-production aspects of the recording.

When Walla met with Tegan and Sara in October 2008 to discuss their follow-up to The Con, he encouraged them to record with him in a manner that channeled the electricity of their live performances. Shortly thereafter, the sisters, who currently live in Vancouver and Montréal, respectively, embarked on a trip to New Orleans to write together for the first time, to galvanize the creative groundwork for the album that would become Sainthood, their most musically assertive collection yet. Although the week-long exercise yielded no songs fit for the album, the minimal, single-microphone setup put the songwriters in what Sara describes as “a simple state of mind” sonically. Lyrically, however, Sara devised complicated challenges for her sister and herself.

“Sara really pushed me to write from different perspectives,” Tegan reveals. “She had written from my dad’s perspective. When we were there, she was like, ‘Try to write a song about what Dad must have thought when we were kids and he left.’ And I was like, ‘Oh man, that sounds so hard. I don’t want to do that.’”

Sara is keenly aware that she and her sister have reached the age that their parents were when they divorced, and her songwriting on the last two albums has reflected her insights on childhood and family. After six albums and more than a decade of touring, it’s reasonable to assume that Tegan and Sara may have thought about settling down and starting their own families, but with another world tour commencing at such an artistically prolific stage in their career, parenthood has yet to become a primary ambition.

“I get really scared the older we get, ‘cause I want to have a family and I want to go back to university and I want to do all of these other things,” Sara says. “Maybe I’m being stereotypical, but there’s something about being a woman that, the idea that I would be pregnant and have a baby pretty much makes it seem like I wouldn’t be able to tour anymore. How could I ever leave my kid at home? That’s how I think.”

“I don’t know if kids are in the immediate future, but we’re definitely in the section of our lives where we start to prioritize family and staying home a little more,” Tegan says. “We write this great music, and I want to share it with people, but I don’t want it to make me feel like I’m giving up something to give it to people. It’s just about balance.”