Six albums and 10 years into their career as indie-pop double threats Tegan and Sara, the 29-year-old Canadian duo have put enough distance between themselves and their first releases to analyze them critically. Quite critically, it turns out. “I like to think that our career is divided into two really important times. Those first couple of records, I’ve come to terms with how embarrassed I am of them and see them as … development,” Sara Quin tells Rolling Stone. “Now we understand our voices and the songwriting process and how we want to present ourselves to the audience. We also have an audience now.”
That kind of brutal honesty has helped endear the pair to their loyal fans, who sometimes like to express their admiration in aggressive ways. Tegan kicked off a Halloween night show in New York by indicating the burly security guards positioned onstage and giving a brief speech about the good and bad ways to show the band love: “Sometimes you guys get so excited you run up here and that scares Tegan and Sara.”
But the duo never forget that their onstage storytelling gives fans a real connection, and recently issued a series of three revealing books called On It At that document tours and a trip to New Orleans that marked the first time they’d ever attempted to write together. (Watch the video above to hear more on that experience.) They decided to turn transcripts of their writing sessions into scripts, and amp up the drama by adding an Alfred Hitchcock-like element. They landed on Rorschach ink-blot tests, which they recreated for each limited-edition copy of the book (watch them painstakingly dropping ink on paper here). “We found out we were crazy, as well,” Sara adds. Ink blots “always kind of look like lungs or butterflies,” Tegan says. R...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily