Tegan And Sara On Going From Indie Darlings To Mastering The Pop Landscape

The last time these pop darlings graced our shores was back in 2013, promoting their breakthrough album, Heartthrob. Amending their           separation from the ‘Indie-rock’ niche the duo are back with their debut album, Love You To Death, which will be released on June 3rd.

It’s fair to say they can’t wait to return!

“Yes! Big fans! We’ve always had such a wonderful time. Australia has always been so good to us.” Tegan says, Melbourne being one of the bands first international tours back in 2002.

Alongside the release of their current record Tegan and Sara are also performing at this years Splendour in the Grass festival, with additional sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne. “We’ve always had a really good time being down here during festivals. We’re really excited!”

Once their tour for Heartthrob came to an end the duo decided to take sometime off to relax. “We took a few months off to go on vacation and spend some time with our family and friends.” Tegan says.

After their sabbatical they got right back into it and commenced writing and recording Love You To Death. “It was a long lead up to the record. We slowly stretched out our promos and spaced out the releases of our music videos.

We didn’t feel like we had to rush. This record was about returning to past themes. Creating a more intense and deep pallet of emotions and sounds, but also taming previous themes from past albums. We’re happy our fans have embraced the new album and are getting on board with it.”

Three singles off the album have already been released in-tie with music videos, their latest single being ‘100x’. Anyone who’s a devoted dog lover will highly appreciate it.

In correspondence with their single releases, Tegan explains the story behind the first hit single, ‘Boyfriend’. “It was influenced by a personal situation Sara experienced with her current relationship. The person she was in relationship with was also seeing other people.

Sara felt like her partner was categorising her as her ‘boyfriend’ and employing all these gender-based rules. Such as, you take out the garbage and you do this, because you’re the ‘man’.

Getting someone to take you seriously, especially in a relationship, and valuing gender equality and foreseeing it as a neutral situation and not being so gender specific can be difficult.” The honesty within the song is all in the lyrics, ‘you treat me like your boyfriend’ ‘I blame myself for thinking we both understood’

Reflecting on the inspiration for the record, “It was about bridging emotional intensity – it’s a very reflective record. It poses opportunity to look back on our lives, take stock on patterns and behaviours in relationships. It’s less about a specific moment in time – but more of a feeling.

For Sara, she is in a now happy and healthy relationship, which made her ponder on long term feelings – surrounding weddings and marriage, and what those feelings meant for her. There was definitely a lot of emotional creativity behind this record.” Tegan says.

[include_post id=”477644″]Taking a new approach with their current album, the girls have traded in their guitars for keyboards, utilising different instruments – giving the record a more poppy vibe. “We became more involved with pop act organisations by approaching mainstream press and radio. Basically, creating a plan of what we wanted to achieve with making a record. Past albums such as The Con and Sainthood, were more piano/keyboard orientated. Piano being the first instrument we learnt, we’re more confident with that and we’ve embraced it. I find guitar can take you out of the song, and it just became an obstruction.”

Returning to help is renowned studio producer, Greg Kurstin, who also helped the duo produce Heartthrob. With Kurstin’s knack for working with big names such as Adele and Katy Perry, the girls are more than happy to have had him back on board with Love You To Death.

“He’s a funny-nice guy, who likes to work with us. He has formed this bridging world of female singers. We find him very encouraging, we love working with him.” Tegan says.

Being in the industry for seventeen years, Tegan and Sara still manage a fluid notion of motivation and creativity – they find themselves very lucky to never endure the void of writers block. “We never really suffer from writers block. With age we’re able to have insight to those experiences, and we never cut ourselves off from our writing. We continually have experiences and benefit with having something to say.”

Even after being in the industry for a while, there are still plenty more goals the girls wish to achieve. “Pleasure, purpose and passion! It’s a continuous
learning process, we have so much we want to achieve.

“Being able to share the stage with big acts likes The Killers, Katy Perry and The Black Keys – we got the chance to experience to play for a larger audience and experience different values. One of our main goals is to perform on SNL, we haven’t been to South America or Eastern Europe, so that is on our bucketlist of things to do.” Explains Tegan.

Not only prospering as musicians, the girls have also grown as people – throughout their career they’ve been inspirational role models for their fans and strong representatives for the LGBT community. “Being accountable to the audience to be a responsible public figure and a good person. All our experiences and responsibilities have definitely shaped us into the individuals we are today.” Tegan says.

Besides the tour and album promotion the girls plan on having some downtime whilst in Australia. “It’ll be a quick trip, just enough time to fit in family, friends, dinners, catch some festivals and see other bands.”