Tegan and Sara Quin are Canadian identical twin sisters but are also a music duo. They first signed to PolyGram records in 1998 and this lead them to touring with Neil Young.
Both living in Vancouver, they recently went back and revisited to the music they made in high school. This was a time when both of them were figuring out their sexuality. The pair made a memoir called High School along with a record Hey, I’m Just Like You with 12 tracks. They wrote them in their teenage years but as adults, they re-recorded them.
It wasn’t easy for Sara to go back and listen to these songs. She was concerned that she “would hear something that I would be embarrassed or ashamed by.” Sara told NPR. Tegan was the one who dug up their old archives as Sara didn’t have the best memories from those years. She explains, “Tegan stole all our self-confidence in the womb.”
The memoir started out when the Quin’s created the Tegan and Sara Foundation, which is a charity that campaigns and fundraises for LGBTQ women. And then they made the book proposal which stuck. It goes through their stories as teenagers, dabbling with drugs and finding their sexuality.
Tegan says she likes balance between the music they make now and in their teenage years. “We threw in a lot of different things from the last 20-some years, and hoped that if Tegan and Sara from 1997 could get in a time machine and hear it, that they wouldn’t be embarrassed by how we changed it.”
The two of them are gay and it was a surprise to Tegan that before they came out, which they did at different times and in different ways, “all of the hiding that we were doing in our real lives, we were completely exposed in our music.” The music they were making was obvious that they weren’t writing about hot guys as they were using female pronouns. That changed though on their first six records. They stopped using pronouns and kept their music “less specific.”
The and never really came out to the public, their sexuality was not a big deal. One of their first interviews was with Lesbian News, they were on the cover but they were worried it would hurt their career. Neil Young’s manager told them, “What career? You don’t have a career yet. There’s nothing to hurt.”
They started out with the name Sara and Tegan but their manager told them that the name blends together but there needs to be an enunciation with Tegan and Sara.
With nine albums under their belt, three Junos, two Western Canadian Music Awards and two GLAAD Media Awards, as well as performing with Queen Taylor Swift, I’d say their careers have turned out pretty good.