Sara Quin On Tegan And Sara’s Career Renaissance

These days Tegan And Sara are a full-fledged multimedia force with an Amazon TV show based on their hit memoir, High School, a just released, to critical acclaim, graphic novel in Junior High, and more. But all of these new endeavors started from their enduring popularity in music, which remains at the heart of Tegan And Sara.

Music, and their love for the art form, remains at the core of all that twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin do. To that end, the beloved duo will hit the road, starting August 14 at L.A.’s beautiful new state of the art venue The Bellweather (where acts like Haim and Porter Robinson christened the refurbished venue, formerly Prince’s Glam Slam in the ’90s).

The Bellweather date kicks off a run that goes, off and on, through November 4, where it wraps as of now in Solvang, California. Among the dates on the “Crybaby Tour 2023,” are September 15 at Riot Fest in Chicago, September 17 at Sea Hear Now fest in Asbury Park, NJ and October 14 in Austin, TX for the prestigious ACL festival.

Sara Quin spoke with Sage Bava and I about being a new mother, how your role in the music industry changes when you survive the business for more than 20 years, playing live and much more.

Steve Baltin: I love Vancouver. It’s beautiful up there.

Sara Quin: It is very beautiful. I moved back because my partner and I were trying to have a kid and then during the pandemic, obviously we were here, and then we had a kid, and so now I feel like we’re here forever [laughter].

Baltin: I’m going to guess since you are in Vancouver, you probably have not been to the Bellwether yet.

Quin: No, I haven’t. I’m super excited. After all these years of playing everywhere, you see the same rooms. It’s very rare that you get to see a new room, and usually if you’re seeing a new room, it means something bad [laughter]. So i to have a new space in Los Angeles is very exciting. Not to say anything bad about the venues that we play in L.A. L.A is one of my favorite places to play because of the venues, but I’m excited to play somewhere new.

Sage Bava: Within this flow of new versus old, I’d love to hear, you have all of these incredible new facets of who you are. Has this changed your approach to giving these performances and connecting with your listeners?

Quin: Honestly, I just feel like we’ve been playing live for so long that it’s a job and it’s something that we love to do, and I feel like we’re really good at it. And at least as a performer, those days where you get on stage, and even if it’s one song, sometimes it’s longer than one song, when you feel yourself just really caught up in just making the music again. That doesn’t happen every night. It doesn’t happen every time you pick up an instrument. So at this point in our career, if that happens a couple times a week, I get really excited. It’s my goal first and foremost, whenever we’re stepping on stage, to put on something authentic and professional. I want it to sound great, and I want to make sure that we hit enough of the material that fans love and adore. And serving that community has always been our primary goal. But if you get that little disconnect, that little magical hard to articulate feeling, just caught up in the music, that’s a gift.

Baltin: Can you put yourself in the stand-point of someday your kid is going to come watch you play for the first time. So can you put yourself in that mindset of what that’s going to be like? And at that point, I imagine everything becomes new and exciting again, like Sage was saying.

Quin: Yeah, it’s interesting. The relationship with him is so new that I’m not necessarily thinking about what he’s going to experience of me, but I’m definitely very inspired by thinking about him becoming himself. I was thinking about this the other day. I have cats and I love my cats. One of my cats specifically is like the love of my life. But anyway, she’s a cat, I think about her as a kitten and I think about her as nine-year-old cat, and that’s who she is. I know her. And the thing that is so like joyful and strange and terrifying about a kid is that you kind of know them, but they’re also evolving every day, every second. They’re becoming something new, physically, developmentally, all of these things. And so, right now, mostly when I think about Sid as my kid, as a grown-up or Sid as a teenager, or Sid as a five-year-old getting to come to a Tegan and Sara concert and maybe cognitively getting like, “Oh s**t, this is what my mom does,” I’m totally inspired thinking about that. It’s like you’re like the cruise director of his life. It’s just like, “Where do we go next? What can I show him? What beats do we hit on the way to him becoming himself?” That’s very inspiring to me, but he’s already been on tour with us and he’s been through sound checks and he’s seen us perform and stuff. And he’s just like getting into music. We taught him how to snap. He can’t really snap, but he goes like this. It’s kind of like when you’re at a protest, and people like go like this. It’s cool, it’s great.

Baltin: It’s an interesting thing for you as well that you’re spending all this time looking back at the same time thinking about him. That juxtaposition has got to be wild of going back through your experiences as a student in high school and junior high, and then thinking about what his experiences will be like.

Quin: Yeah, I needed 20 years between when I went to high school and when I looked back at high school, I needed a 20 year break. I feel like we were really honest about our high school experience and it definitely was challenging, but there’s also a great deal of nostalgia for me. I love my friends from high school. I’m still in their life and I can look back now and mostly conjure up really good feelings. I hope Sid’s adolescence is not as turbulent as mine. And I think a lot of that had to just do with my sexuality and growing up in a time where I feel like I had to carry the burden of knowledge alone for a long time about who I was. Even going back to the thing I was just saying about watching Sid bloom into whoever he’s going to be, I hope that I can be supportive of that process all the way along. And I’m sure that’s what every parent for the most part wants. But in my case at some point I had to hide a big part of who I was and who I was becoming. And in reflecting on my own adolescence, I hope I’m able to better equip him to be supported through what is, I think, a challenging time for all people. Adolescence is the pits. It just sucks. So yeah, maybe in some ways, this kind of like revisiting our past, hopefully it’s educational. Hopefully it’ll make me a better parent of an adolescent. We’ll see.

Bava: I’m so inspired by your powerful and true voice and message and just how unwavering it is. I love to ask artists where they discovered that voice. And I’m curious, through all this nostalgia, to see where all those seeds were planted.

Quin: I feel like I’m exactly the same as I always was. Actually one of the most heartening things about going back and looking through all the archival footage of us as young people in high school, the vast majority of that, by the way, was not us being in a band. It was us hanging out with our friends and goofing off and at parties and interviewing each other for school projects. Really normal organic moments where we were just being ourselves. I wish I saw a big difference between that person at 16 and me now, but I just feel like I got better at articulating, what I feel, what I think, what I believe. But the vast majority of what I watch on screen, I’m like, that could be yesterday. And I just always feel like I had this personality, this voice, and that is in my music and it’s in my stage persona and it’s in the way that I give interviews. I got better at it because I do it all the time and, 20 years of repetition of doing interviews or playing a song or, whatever, you get better at it. But I think the core thing that makes me me has always been there. And actually, if you’re the type of person who a persona is really important to you, that’s very specific. But, I think for the most part, nurturing your authentic voice or your authentic self or whatever, people are too self-aware of it. I never sat around being like, “Okay, so what goals do I have around nurturing myself or my voice?” I just didn’t think about it. It’s too meta. It’s like a weird cultural narcissism. Just be your f**king self. If you think about it too much, you’re actually not really being yourself. So I always tell people, not to think too much about it. Just if you have the thing, it’s usually there.

Baltin: I know for myself and from talking to so many artists, you just get much more comfortable as you get older. You get more confident in who you are. And that’s when you stop thinking about what everybody else thinks.

Quin: Yeah, I think that that’s probably very true for a lot of people. I still feel as self-conscious as I did as a teenager, just about different things. As a woman at 42, now I’m self-conscious about aging. I don’t care about how much progress we’ve made, men age and are encouraged to age in a very different way and embrace their aging in a very different way than women are. And I don’t think that that’s really changed that much. I’m not throwing shade at anybody. But I’m not talking about this bloated obsession with wellness culture of drinking bone broth and putting 68 creams on your eyes or whatever. I’m talking about, what is my value in society as a woman who’s now 42 with lots of experience. And it’s very evident that we’re still a culture really obsessed with youth. And it’s confusing, especially when you’re a woman, because I spent the first half of my adult life being told I was too young to have an opinion that mattered. And now I’m old and people are let’s give you awards before we put you in a grave. I think there’s a little bit of your voice means nothing, and suddenly your voice is omnipresent. So I’m still very self-conscious about that. But, am I more confident in other ways? Of course. If I was still obsessing over the things I did when I was 16, I would definitely want a refund on all the therapy I did.

Baltin: What you just said was so interesting about the aging, because it’s particularly true in music. Nick Cave is the most fascinating example of a guy who basically spent his whole career playing three -five thousand people places, and all of a sudden he is the coolest rock god in the universe. And Leonard Cohen wasn’t Leonard Cohen until near the end. So there’s also just something of what you said about having that voice that becomes omnipresent. In general in music if you stick around long enough, all of a sudden you matter.

Quin: Yeah, and I want to be really clear, I feel very respected in the music industry right now. [laughter]. We felt like real outsiders and really dumped on for the first part of our career, like homophobia and misogyny and all the other things. Like we were not cool. It was really hard. It was a brutal time. But I’m also very aware and grateful for the respect that is shown to our project and our legacy now. I really appreciate that. Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen they’re respected for their survival, their evolution and sometimes they’re hot and sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they’re making their best work and sometimes they’re just making stuff. And I think there’s lots of women. I’m thinking about Patti Smith or Cyndi Lauper or a million people. Even recently I was revisiting the Breeders and I was like, “The Deal sisters are literally the coolest people on the planet.” Or the Indigo Girls, bands that I grew up with and was inspired by. And to see them now being creatively embraced and culturally embraced is so inspiring. And if we’re also lucky that’s how I feel. But I’m the same age as Chris Martin from Coldplay. And I I look at Chris Martin from Coldplay and he’s in his colorful rainbow outfit and he’s playing stadiums and he’s doing whatever. I just assume Chris is not sitting around going “Oh, we’re a heritage band now and we have to lean into legacy and whatever.” They’re hot as f**k and they’re selling tons of tickets and they’re having a great time. Whereas I think that it’s challenging for a lot of artists women who get into a certain age group to feel competitive. It is the way that it is. I’m not saying anything new here. This is literally just a story as old as time, but it’s what we do with it. I don’t want to be competitive and I’m not trying to entertain 18-year-olds. I’m still trying to be relevant and cool and make stuff that I’m excited by. And if that ends up entertaining 18 year olds great. And if it entertains 80 year olds, I’m fine with that., I could totally be into an old folks’ home circuit if that’s where they need, I’ll go where I’m needed. And if my voice is needed in, at Coachella, great. And if it’s needed at the old folks’ home, I’m okay with that too. [laughter]

Bava: I love how you put it earlier about how you just were always with this voice and how others sometimes have to blossom from that, space of discovery. I’d love to know the intention that you have behind all of these many puzzle pieces you’re putting together. And then also the first memory that you have, where that was born, the first seed was planted within where you are now.

Quin: I guess it just depends. Anecdotally we would always talk about finding a guitar when we were in high school and sitting down and writing songs, because that was the most formed version of who we are now. But, to hear our parents tell it, almost immediately, from the time we were little kids, we were obsessed with recording our voices, listening back. We were really interested in what our parents were interested in. They were young. They were in their 20s, so they were listening to music all the time. So we loved their music. We were really into soundtracks for example. We loved on vinyl, the soundtracks for The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Phantom of the Paradise, the Brian De Palma film. It’s totally wacky doodle. We could sing all of those songs and we would dance downstairs and we would, we were really inspired by, this kids’ singing group, called the Mini Pops. It was a TV show in Canada, I believe it was British, maybe even. But these kids would get all vamped up. We were obsessed with it. And I remember being, “I want to be a Mini Pop.” I remember an attraction to that life. So it feels finally we figured it out at 15 when we found a guitar. But as far back as I can remember, I was drawn to that.

Bava: How do you know that the sculpture has been completed when you are making a project?

Quin: Every kind of project is different. For me, when it comes to music, once I’ve exhausted myself with a song, I love to edit. Also there’s pleasure and pain here for me. I am a masochist. I’m sure songs are done sooner than I allow them to be. But I enjoy pulling things apart. I love to make something and then wonder, well, but what if I remade it in an entirely different way? And that’s part of my artistic process that is introverted and internalized and for me. But mostly I enjoy the process of making something. And I how difficult it is because the reward at the end is very specific for me. Obviously the writing process for books or the creative collaboration we’ve done for the TV show or whatever, has more parameters and checkpoints along the way. Music is where there are no rules. And I think that’s why it’s so beautiful, is that it’s sort of boundaryless and I can do whatever I want.