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In High School, the new television show depicting Tegan and Sara Quin’s formative nineties teenagehood (brought to TV by Clea Duvall, as if it wasn’t gay enough), we repeatedly see the sisters meet the rush of a new favorite song head-on and dance in the waves. In the first episode, the twins, played by TikTok stars Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, jump hand-in-hand to the thundering bass of Hole’s “She Walks On Me.” In the second, Sara sings the Violent Femmes’ “Kiss Off” to her girlfriend. It’s uncanny to watch these two teenagers dance in the ashes of nineties grunge the same way I grew up imprinting on the music they went on to create.
So many moments of my life are associated with Tegan and Sara songs: Seeing them play “Closer” live in 2013 at a free (and freezing) show in Philadelphia; exchanging mixes, featuring songs like “Nineteen” and “So Jealous,” with my only queer friend in high school; and most recently, listening to their tenth album, Crybaby, out today from their new label, Mom + Pop Music.
Those memories flash by as I sit across from the twins on a warm fall afternoon at an office in midtown Manhattan, trying to rise to the occasion of interviewing my idols, both of them rocking decidedly queer shag haircuts. Over the course their 25-year career, which encompasses most of my life, openly LGBTQ+ musicians have fought for space in the industry, helping to usher in sweeping cultural change that is now being met with a reactionary backlash.
“So much has changed in our lifetime, yours and ours,” Tegan tells me, looking predictably chic in a highlighter-yellow jacket. “And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that and acknowledging it, and we do it all the time, because we think it’s important to.” But she’s also careful to consider the responsibility inherent in her role as a trailblazing queer artist.
“I think our job as public people – not just as musicians, but now people who have a foundation that raises money for LGBTQ people, and now with a TV show – is to find a balance of how to talk about the wins and be out and share our experience, but then also make sure that we highlight that there is still work to be done,” Tegan says.
Tegan and Sara’s 25th year in the business has been filled with even more change than usual. The twins used their respective lockdowns to continue expanding the Tegan and Sara-verse, executive producing High School with Duvall. (High School began its life as a memoir in 2019; Duvall reportedly read it in one day and pitched the twins the following day on adapting it as a series.) They continued running the Tegan and Sara Foundation, which they founded in 2016 to “improve the lives of LGBTQ+ women and girls,” and which Tegan notes has pivoted over the last three years to “focus on nonbinary and trans organizations that are nonbinary- and trans-led, and obviously with a major focus on people of color.”
They have also been working on two graphic novels, both slated to come out in 2023 — and on a personal note, Sara had her first child in the summer of 2022. To top it all off, they recorded their tenth album, which they say is their first written truly collaboratively. (Light work for two Virgos, I guess.)
The album came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the twins took a career pause for possibly the first time to take stock of all the sudden shifts in their lives.
“The subject matter, as much as it was sort of heavy and intense for me around fertility stuff and relationship stuff and life stuff, there’s also joy in all of those things: Regeneration,” Sara recalls, noting how heavily her decision to have a child shaped the record. “It’s not really an album about making the choice, it’s like, ‘I’ve made the choice and now I’m living in this sort of space before the thing happens.’ And I think that’s a really infectious feeling when you’ve been still for a really long time, right?”
Sonically, Crybaby feels in conversation with current releases from alternative bands like Muna, Haim, Mitski, and Snail Mail. The album was produced by John Congleton, and you can hear echoes of his work with previous collaborators Sharon Van Etten and St. Vincent in the lush adult-contemporary layered production and the bursts of glitchy, guitar-forward electro-rock. Tegan’s favorite song — at least on the day we speak — is “Under My Control,” and she sells me on it; its deceptively upbeat, sardonic-singsong chord progression feels like it belongs on the soundtrack for a late ’90s teen comedy soundtrack, or at least an homage to one in the style of Do Revenge. “I should start working on myself again / Get these feelings that I feel within / Under my control,” chants the Sara-penned chorus, a mature response to overwhelming emotion.
Guitar rock and electropop influences across the record call to mind the brittle urgency of 2007’s The Con; elsewhere, Crybaby evokes the infectious poppy propulsion of their post-2013 work, with standouts like “Sometimes I See Stars” and “Fucking Up What Matters.”
In many ways, though, Tegan and Sara are simply rejoining a conversation they helped spark in the first place. Acts like Muna and Snail Mail owe their ability to traverse the range between heavier genres like emo and rock and the lighter sound of auteur-style pop in part to the Quins. The sister’s 2013 album Heartthrob — one of several watershed stylistic shifts in the Tegan and Sara oeuvre — inspired Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and Taylor Swift’s 1989, both heavily celebrated pop albums by straight artists who have a large queer fanbase.
Tegan and Sara’s mid-2010s pop domination was driven by their dedication to expand possibilities for queer people in music. “It was a deliberate choice to make an album [like Heartthrob] that would gain access to the mainstream so that we could queer it a little bit,” says Tegan. “There really weren’t that many people doing what we were doing. There were tons of them doing it in the underground, but no one was letting them up.”
Although they felt uncomfortable with the ways their youth, their genders, and their queerness were commodified by the industry, they wanted the superstar treatment – and so they made the kind of music that could grow their listenership. “We understand the privilege of the way we look and that we were twins, and that allowed us to be more mainstream than a lot of queer underground artists and we totally acknowledge that,” continues Tegan. “But we had a job to do. We were like, ‘Fuck this, I’m tired of being relegated to the underground. I want more exposure.’ And that was the biggest reward at that time.”
The alternative-pop genre is now pleasantly overrun by queer artists, like Halsey, Hayley Kiyoko, and Rina Sawayama in the pop direction, and Arlo Parks, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker in the rock direction, though obviously these categories are ever-overlapping. These days, the Quins are grateful to be able to share the spotlight. “There’s times where Sara and I lean into our role as not just trailblazers, but spokespeople, public people, queer people,” Tegan lists off. “Other times, we have learned – especially as we’ve gotten older – that it’s okay for us to take a step back.”
“There’s also so many more people doing it now,” Sara adds.
That plurality of voices has given the twins a welcome reprieve from being asked to represent the whole LGBTQ+ community. They have long been frustrated by the expectation that they be a mouthpiece. In some ways, the sisters will always be associated with a very specific, white cis depiction of lesbian culture, grouped in with millennial queer fare like The L Word, but that stereotype ignores the fact that they have grown with the times, pushing to bring others along with them every step of the way as their platform expanded.
“We were like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to be the spokesperson for all LGBTQ people. I’m not nonbinary, and I am cis, and maybe I’m not the best voice to have in this room,’” Tegan continues. “And I know that for a long time, we were the only ones, but we’re not the only ones, so please for the love of God pick anyone else.” They’re quick to shout their contemporaries back, name-checking Muna, girl in red, and King Princess, passing the mic while still doing their own thing.
“It’s not just about taking a seat and saying, ‘I’m gonna sit this round out,’” Sara says, picking up the thread from Tegan. “It’s about saying to every single person that comes to us now and asks us for feedback or a quote or an interview, if we’re taking a seat, we don’t just say, ‘No, thank you.’ We say ‘Here are literally 50 other people who can tell you everything, give you amazing pull quotes, who are so valuable and need to be invited into this space.’”
It’s an ethos that Sara believes is guiding the duo into the future of their career. “That itself is the second layer of work that I think is going to probably end up making up the rest of our career, is less about our voices and more about, ‘Are we making sure that there’s space for other voices?’”
The sisters, who both live with their partners in Vancouver, are concerned about LGBTQ+ rights writ large as increasingly fascistic right-wing politics take hold in the U.S., the U.K., and around the world. “When we started the Foundation five years ago, every organization we met with around the country warned us about this,” Tegan says, recalling the bellwethers that warned them of present-day “Don’t Say Gay” and anti-trans bills. “They said, ‘In three to five years, you will see hundreds of religious freedom acts, bills, that will come on the floor, that will start to systematically attack younger and younger trans people. That’s the next fight. That’s the next movement.’”
So that’s where they focused their efforts, funding community organizations with grants of $2,500 to $5,000, which Tegan says “keep these grassroots organizations up and running for months at a time.” (Tax records show that in 2020, the foundation helped fund LGBTQ+ summer camps for queer youth, a crisis hotline for incarcerated people, COVID-related aid programs, and more.)
That commitment to helping smaller, underserved LGBTQ+ organizations stems from Tegan and Sara’s vivid recollection of what it’s like to feel like you’re shouting into a void. “When you’ve also felt like nobody is listening to you, when suddenly people will listen to you, you return the favor,” Sara says. “There’s a lot of reciprocity in the community, where we didn’t necessarily experience reciprocity anywhere outside of the community.”
But whether it’s making music or doing charity work, the throughline in Tegan and Sara’s ever-changing career is a commitment to taking young women and young queer people seriously. It’s the focus of High School as both a book and show, and the driving principle behind their 2019 album Hey I’m Just Like You. The sisters don’t seem trapped by their past, having embraced it instead, diving into the muck of their adolescence to create bold new work. Rather than running from their roots, they want to stay in touch with the young people for whom they continue to be a beacon.
“Because of the show, I feel like a lot of young people are going to discover our music now,” Tegan says. “There’s like fifteen-year-olds who are writing [into our newsletter] and being like, ‘I just literally discovered your music two weeks ago and I just can’t believe it, and this is so cool. You’re my idols now.’”
I felt that same allure during my own adolescence, which overlapped with their early indie heyday and mainstream pop success. I can’t imagine LGBTQ+ representation — or at the very least sapphic representation — without Tegan and Sara.
“Representation” is a fickle thing, a concept used and misused so many times its meaning has been divorced from its connotation. I’m supposed to be as tired of writing about it as they’re supposed to be of talking about it – and to be clear, I think we all are, the three of us sitting in a nondescript Flatiron office. But in sharing that they were part of the limited queer representation I had growing up, I mention I saw them live a decade ago. Their faces light up. Sara remembers the show distinctly because of the bitter cold in Philadelphia that made her lose her voice, causing them to cancel two subsequent shows.
Tegan grows animated as we recall the day. It mattered to me and my best friend to see Tegan and Sara, and to be able to see them for free.
“I know it sounds silly and I don’t need to turn it around to make it part of this interview, but we think a lot about legacy and career, and who we are as people. And it’s funny, but so much of what’s motivated us – and so much of what’s kept us the people we are today – has been this concept,” Tegan says. “That is why you bring your best attitude when you get on stage. That is why you go do the free event. That is why you’re nice to people when they come up to you on the street. Because ten years later, they’re probably going to interview you.”
Crybaby is out now from Mom + Pop Music.
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