r a n S a g d Te an
Pride in place
by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen / The Big Issue Australia / courtesy of INSP.ngo
Imagine spending more than half your life working professionally with your twin sister – being so intertwined in every aspect of your life that the public line blurs between your sibling ending and you beginning. You’re both queer, musicians and activists – your lives are so similar that it seems one cannot exist without the other.
Imagine, then, digging up the archives two decades into your career, and finding out new things about each other after all this time. That’s exactly what Tegan and Sara have done with their memoir, High School – a retrospective writing project that became much more. “We never spoke about being gay [early on], or about the secret relationships we were having with girls, and yet our whole adult lives, people have said to us, ‘Tegan must have been the first person you told when you realized you were gay’,” Sara Quin says. “And I would be like, ‘no, that’s not true at all’ – but when I sat down to write the book, in some ways, I also held these kinds of assumptions. “I’d always assumed that Tegan was also suffering the way I was, or that she was also having secret relationships the way that I was, and it turned out she wasn’t – she wasn’t as preoccupied by her body or her sexuality, she wasn’t as insecure as I was. She was just living her life, and that was a surprise to me – that we could be so different and also so similar.” While writing High School, the twins looked for archival material to draw upon. When they unearthed recordings of the first songs they ever wrote together as teenagers growing up in
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Calgary, Canada, as well as early performance footage, they realized they’d struck gold.
“There was something really striking to me, specifically about the video of us performing the music,” Sara says. “When I look back at that young version of myself, it really is this very punk rock attitude of: ‘Here are my songs, we’re the best.’ I really just feel like the kid versions of ourselves are so much cooler and braver than I ever gave us credit for. “The songs were really inspiring and had this energy and excitement. They were addictive to listen to. I found them immediately really hooky and listenable, and I just kept thinking, ‘maybe we should do something with these – not just put them out as they once were, but put some oxygen into them and allow people to hear them as they could have been’.” The result is Hey, I’m Just Like You – the pair’s ninth album, reimagining 12 of those teenage tracks through their signature synth-pop lens. Diehard fans will recognize some songs from crackly old acoustic demos, but it’s Tegan and Sara as they are today, remembering Tegan and Sara as they were 20 years ago: anarchic teenagers figuring out the world through music. The album fits neatly into the cultural fascination with teenage nostalgia, which has driven much of recent pop culture, such as series Big Mouth or PEN15 – deconstructions of the adolescent journey for an older audience equipped with the wisdom of hindsight. For Tegan and Sara, going back to their teenage years was not only
about reminiscing, but also about understanding the roadmap to their current lives and providing a window for queer representation.
“There’s a scarcity when it comes to queer stories – it’s really only in the last couple of decades that we’ve really even seen any queer stories told on a mainstream level,” Sara says. “As we get older, we can see that our audience is interested in seeing themselves reflected at every age. We’ve spent a lot of years writing songs about relationships, and songs about our sibling relationship and the way we see the world, and in my mind it’s almost like there’s this missing gap or story about ourselves as young queer artists trying to figure ourselves out. It is nostalgia but it’s also just an interesting study of ourselves.” The sisters are proud activists, having founded the Tegan and Sara Foundation in 2016 to fight for the rights of LGBTIQ girls and women. Looking back, Sara can see where that fire began. “In some ways we were more hopeful about the future than I remembered,” she says. “A lot of teenagers are like, ‘adults are the worst, they ruin everything, we’re going to be better than the people who came before us.’ That’s what being young is – being critical of the people who fucked up the planet, the world, who did things wrong and treated people badly, made mistakes. “We knew we could be trailblazers and change things, which didn’t always make us outspoken, but it did give us this kind of momentum into our future.”
