When I meet twin Canadian pop musicians Tegan and Sara in the lobby of their midtown hotel, I can't help but wonder what the fuck they are doing staying in a place like this—I could practically spit on the Four Seasons from here, and the street outside is awash in the suits of executives and business casual of underlings. "You don't want to feel like you're going to a club when you go to your hotel, but some people really love that shit," Sara tells me, referencing the Rivington Hotel, which is where their friends say they should be staying. "We've been coming to New York for eight years, but I've never seen a Broadway play and I've never gone to the Met, so this time I was like, I'm gonna do all of that."
They've been in town for almost a week doing press for The Con, their new LP due out in July on Neil Young's Vapor Records. It's been three years since they released So Jealous, an album that was hugely successful with fans but received mixed reactions from critics. The Calgary natives, nearing their mid-twenties, toured hard in support of their last album, capturing audiences with a rare, youthful honesty and openness—they famously banter and bicker onstage just like you'd expect twin sisters to do—the sort of authentic, heart-on-your sleeve pop that puts the overproduced and under-thought sentimentality pervasive in the genre to shame.
Their last two albums were produced by John Collins (New Pornographers) and David Carswell (The Smugglers), but after losing their drummer and bassist during and after their last tour respectively, they saw an opportunity to start from scratch. "We obviously had a little bit more money to make a record," says Tegan, "not a lot more, but enough that we could say maybe we don't need to make the record in our home city, maybe we can actually hire someone who lives in the States." The two put together a list of people they wanted to work with, which included Christopher Walla of Death Cab for Cutie.
Living on opposite sides of Canada (Tegan in Vancouver, B.C. and Sara in Montreal), the sisters, who write songs individually before collaborating to finish the tracks, demoed an album's worth of material and then some over the course of a year before Sara met Walla at a DCFC show in Montreal. "Sara came home and was like...'He really likes the idea that we demoed everything ourselves and he really wants to encourage us to record the record backwards so we can record all our parts and then the drums and bass," recalls Tegan, "which is something we've been asking to do our whole lives it seems like and everyone was always like no, no, you record drums and bass first..."
"The songs were done in our minds," says Tegan, "so we didn't want to get into a place where we had demos that sounded like what we wanted but then record a record that sounded like So Jealous." Tegan went to the Sasquatch Music Festival in George, Washington, to give the demos to Walla, which he took with him as DCFC set out on a tour of Europe. "He sent an email one day saying 'I rented a car and drove around all day listening to this and it's amazing,'" she remembers.
photo: AUTUMN DE WILDE
After recording So Jealous, in interviews the two had expressed a desire to start producing their own records, something they inched closer to doing this time around, because of both the time spent demoing the songs and Walla's understanding of what they wanted to do. "Tegan and I are really capable of articulating what we want," says Sara, "and all we need is someone who can help us execute it." The two describe the album as a hybrid of their home recordings and the work they did with Walla and contibutors Jason McGerr (DCFC), Hunter Burgan (AFI) and Matt Sharp (The Rentals) in-studio.
"We definitely think its looser," opines Sara. "With John and Dave, they wanted everything to line up and we'd spend a lot of time doing guitars so that it was perfect, with Chris, I know that he is like that, but with us he was just like...'You guys have a sound and it does move around a little bit, it is a little looser, but that's your sound and you don't have to always go away from that,' and so I think although it does seem a bit wider or looser, there's a bit more of an open feel to it; it's actually what we imagine in our minds when we're making music."
In addition to turning the success of So Jealous into an opportunity to create and record music more in their own vision, Tegan and Sara have taken more control of their tour plans, looking to get back to their small-venue roots in order to maximize the experience, not the profits, for themselves and their fans. "When we were starting our planning for this record I went down to LA and met with our agent..." says Tegan. "We started talking about venues and I was like, I think I would rather play multiple nights than play 5000 or 2500-seat venues even. Once you cross the 1500 mark it gets really impersonal. And he said 'That's going to make for long touring,' and I said 'That's fine, I'd rather be out on the road longer if I know the shows are going to be better'...We've handpicked every single venue that we're playing, all the way up to Christmas.... [We] worked it out to where the ticket prices weren't going to be too high, and we didn't want the doors to be too late, and we wanted to make sure they weren't going to be taking a huge merch cut, because then we have to mark up our merch prices. We ended up having to not go into a lot of venues that we wanted to because we end up having to sell our t-shirts for 35 dollars, and Sara and I were just like absolutely not, that's ridiculous. So we just became the most high-maintenance small band of all time. But our agent really gets it. He works with a lot of interesting bands and he was just like, 'Its cool, you've got to the level where you can decide, and if you don't want to play an HOB [House of Blues] venue because they're going to take 30 percent of your merch then don't. We'll find you another venue.' So this is the record where we care less about selling as many tickets as possible and more just about playing the nicest venue we can find that will accommodate everybody."
"As exciting as it is to get bigger and have more fans and sell tickets and everything," adds Sara, "my favorite places to play are where you can see practically everyone in the room...and look them in the eye at some point in the night, and I like that. And also that's how we created our initial fan base, that's why they were so passionate about us, is that we were walking up and looking at these people and talking with them and telling them things."
Placing fans over profit, and recording a loose, more live-sounding album rather than a spit-polished one. It just might be crazy enough to work.
