Interview: Tegan and Sara

Prior to their biggest sold out show to date in London, England; Alter The Press sat down with Tegan and Sara before hitting the stage at the Camden Roundhouse.

The Canadian duo spoke to ATP about the recent 'Alligator' remix LP, the forthcoming music videos for 'On Directing' and 'Northshore,' their future plans to conquer the UK and more.

Alter The Press: How has this European run gone so far?
Sara Quin: It's been good. I like how Tegan gave me so much space, because I have the most interesting story from this tour so far; it involved food poisoning, and me having it. This tour has mostly been about barfing.

Tegan Quin: With me, not so much. It's been really good.

Sara: The weather has been really great; the shows have all been amazing. Germany was great; Ireland was insane. I was walking around the venue here, this morning, and it's the most beautiful venue I've seen in London.

Tegan: It's been perfect. It's two weeks, everyone is still fresh faced and happy. We could keep going for another week, but I don't want to, let's not push it.

ATP: Since we last met in November, tell me what you've been up to.
Sara: We toured Canada; we toured America, Australia. You know, just a little touring around the world.

ATP: No big deal.
Sara: Yeah, just thousands of miles and hundreds of shows. It's been wonderful. We've covered most of the bulk of touring with this album, now we are entering the second phase of this campaign, which is opening for people, and festivals. It's a bit more relaxed; the last couple of months were the main headline shows we'll do for this album. In Canada, we were doing two hour shows. It's been quite wonderful. We have been filled with this overwhelming goodwill from press and fans. We feel so happy and, like this is the easiest campaign of our lives.

Tegan: We've gotten to a point in our lives where we can be creative. We are going to announce, in the next week, about an entire package of all of our vinyl. I'm so excited. There will be a package on iTunes where you can buy everything Tegan and Sara related, all of this stuff, which is really neat to look back on. In a different perspective, like Sara said, rather than thinking of this as one record, we are starting to think about this as one comprehensive career. It's really exciting.

Sara: People will think that we're retiring! I feel like we're opening some doors and closing some too.

Tegan: I think this is the end of phase one. We went from being a singer/songwriter/folk act, to an indie/rock band, to a pop band or whatever we are now. I feel like we’ve proved ourselves to be whatever we wanted to be; we were independent, we made it on a major label. After this record, I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to have to contractually do something. I think it'll be a very necessary step, but I don't know what it is yet.

ATP: You recently released the 'Alligator' remix LP. How did this come together?
Sara: The original idea was just to remix the song for radio in the US. They wanted something a little bit poppier, something preferably with Ke$ha singing instead of me. I'm kidding! Our record label would never let us do something like that. They wanted a remix, which happens a lot when you are going to release a song to radio, so we started approaching people about doing dance remixes. There were so many people who said yes, which we're not used to, so we thought it would be interesting if we put out all of them, instead of one or two. It probably seemed a little bonkers, but who knows what the best version is. Our favourite is the Passion Pit version, for example, and I'm sure a lot of people like that version, but there were 20 other versions that other people might really like; we thought it was cool to over-saturate the dance market with a bunch of different versions, and let people play what they wanted. The truth is, the DJs are just remixing their own versions. It must be crazy right now. There are 50 versions of the song out there right now, which is great.

It's like Tegan was saying about the vinyl box set coming out, and everything, this record has been so much fun for us. It's not like we made one record and all the creativity dies; we get to put out new little projects every month, like we just shot two new music videos, which come out in the next month of two.

ATP: Touching on that, you just shot videos for 'On Directing' and 'Northshore'. What made you choose these songs?
Tegan: The label wanted 'Northshore,' because they're going to release it as a single in America, so they wanted a performance video, which I was excited for because, I remember when I wrote it, I thought it would be really fun to do a video for. It's a pretty straight jumping around, rocking out video. I think they released ‘On Directing’ as a single in Canada/Australia and it's a great song. It's always nice to make videos for as many songs as possible from a record.

Sara: Hopefully we'll be able to shoot two more videos, maybe, from this record.

Tegan: Who knows, we are always thinking about long-term, not short-term. As Sara was pointing out, all these creative projects are not just for the moment, they facilitate what happens right now, but, ultimately, it's about our catalogue. Looking back, I wish we did more videos for 'If It Was You', even 'So Jealous'. I wish we did more videos for 'So Jealous.' We only did two, and only one the label paid for; the other one we did ourselves, 'Speak Slow'. Imagine 'You Wouldn't Like Me', just some of those songs on that record would have been really neat; like 'Monday, Monday, Monday,' that was awesome. I feel like we need that to be creative. We need that to survive, to make art from some of these songs.

ATP: Especially at the moment, your new fans have just seen the old music videos for 'The First' and 'Monday, Monday, Monday', as you just uploaded them online.
Tegan: Yeah, which was really weird. When we went into the label, their internet department gave us this lecture saying, “Your facebook page is screwed up, and your YouTube page has got illegal videos on it, and half of the videos aren't even there! Why aren't you verified on Twitter?” and we were like, “I don't know! Aren't you supposed to help us?” At the moment, we are getting all of that fixed right now; getting those videos up was very exciting. I was like: “That’s a big piece of our catalogue that was missing.”

ATP: 'Northshore' is going to be a performance-based video. What can we expect from 'On Directing'?
Sara: It's sort of a performance video as well. It's, quite honestly, just a lot of our faces, one face after the next.

Tegan: It was kind of modeled after Sinead O'Connor's 'Nothing Compared To You', originally. It would have just this face singing, as the lyrics and the song are so important. With 'On Directing', if you can close your eyes, and listen to the song, you can picture it. We didn't want to fuck with that. It's basically Sara and I singing.

Sara: The gentleman touring with us is our lighting director. He really helped us put together a really tasteful light show live, and we asked him to come and do some lights for the video. It has a lot of weird trippy lights and stuff. I hope it's not too arty. I would have gone even artier with it, but I think sometimes, what I want and the kids’ want, is really different. With watching the new Interpol video, which just came out, it's so bizarre. I really admire art videos; I really admire these storytellings and all of these great narratives, but at the end of the day, our fans just really want to see our faces. I don't mean that in a Tiger Beat way, like I just want to look at your face, just because of the rawness of the songs and the material. I think there's something about Tegan and I; that the audience sees themselves in us. On screen, in a weird way, they are seeing themselves. So, when there is this narrative, monkeys and CG, it makes them feel less attached to the video. I'm hoping, with this being just our faces, they are looking into a mirror. I know it sounds shallow, but I want them to see themselves. We just saw some final edits of 'On Directing,' and I feel like we look genuinely engaged. There's this sadness to this song, and that was really captured in the video.

My brain is, right now, 'Videos are so much cheaper to make if you want to make them really cheap.' I feel like all I do is come up with video treatments, like even for songs we've done videos for. I'm like, 'Let's just re-cut videos for everything'.

ATP: The vinyl box set coming out soon. Will it be the back catalogue, just repressed?
Sara: Except for the first record, 'Under Feet Like Ours'. Warner doesn't own it, so we would have to sell it to them. It'll be 'The Business Of Art', 'If It Was You', 'So Jealous', 'The Con', 'Sainthood' and a separate demos vinyl, in a box set.

Tegan: They all have the old covers, but we've revamped all the layouts, made sure it's all sorted. There's a reprinting, because up until 'So Jealous', Warner has a vinyl label, and they are reprinting and reissuing their entire back catalogue. They pitched to us, if we wanted to put it all in one place, and then take demos from the records and press that on vinyl as well.

Sara: There will be some extras, like how we did with the book set. It'll come with a limited edition signed poster. I think the key is that the box is rad. It's a tasteful boxset, and we've never put out any of our demos before. There are probably a few that people haven't heard before.

ATP: After this tour, is the Honda Civic Tour with Paramore, and then the co-headline show in Canada with City and Colour. What is in the works afterwards?
Tegan: In the midst of the Honda Civic Tour, we are announcing headline dates on our days off. We are also shooting a DVD, not a traditional, like shooting one show; we have a massive list of things we want to shoot and do. We are starting work on that, but it won't come out until the new year. In the fall, we're looking at dates in India, Brazil, Singapore and maybe, it's in the preliminary stages, going back to Australia and New Zealand, in support of someone else.

ATP: Last time, you mentioned that you wanted to work on the UK.
Tegan: We failed at that, maybe we should just be happy with selling out the Roundhouse. I think, with the next record, we are going to focus on it. When we said that, we were already into the planning stages of this record. The foresight was that, if something big came here, like an opening tour, we'd come to the UK/Europe and do that. I think that with the next record, we'll be focusing all of our energy on the UK and Germany, maybe starting our record here. I want things to go well here. Almost with no work, we've flown over and lost money, for the last ten years. In the future, I want to be able to come here and tour 12 cities. I want to be a band that come to the UK and do well. I hate reading our fan mail from all over the UK. People from Manchester and Reading saying, 'Where are you? Why don't you come over and visit?' and I don't understand it either. I think we need to revamp our approach about coming to this side of the world. Maybe we are doing it wrong, but we are doing it the best we can. I think it'll change on the next record.

ATP: Is this the last time you'll be coming over with this record?
Tegan: The plan right now, is that this will be it. We're still looking for support stuff. If something cool came up, we would definitely consider it.

Sara: Let's be real. This is the probably last time.

Tegan: I think it is the last time, but it has been thrown out there that there are some really cool tours coming up; especially in the new year, and there have been sniffs of ‘would we be into it?’ I'm not ruling anything out. I think it was Modest Mouse who said it, ‘We don't tour records; we tour, because we tour.’

'Sainthood' is out now on Sire/Vapor Records.

- Jon Ableson