In a city of beige sheds in Burbank, north of Los Angeles, the SirReel Studios live up to their name when Tegan and Sara Quin appear fresh out of makeup, the mirror image of each other, even more so than usual. Fans can usually tell the 35-year-old Canadian identical twins apart: Sara has a heart-shaped face, and Tegan has a little scar from her old labret piercing. Their friends compare anxious Sara to a cat, and breezy Tegan to a dog. In a cab two days prior, Sara and I sat in the back talking about her relationships, while upfront Tegan thrashed to the driver’s alt-‘90s playlist, routinely turning to ask if we were even listening: “Guys, Hole!”
But on this stiflingly hot day in late February, they’re styled to eradicate any differences. “Pretty weird, huh?” says Tegan. They both have slicked-back hair, whited-out lips, and bleached eyebrows to shoot footage for “Boyfriend,” the lead single from their forthcoming eighth album, Love You to Death, that will be part of their live show. Each of the record’s 10 songs will have its own clip, ranging from a DIY video with an Instagram-famous dog groomer (piano ballad “100x”) to this big-budget affair.
On a table are clay busts of Sara's face, which she sat for a few days ago. It was traumatic. The molding material covered everything but her nose, which made her panic. She says she and her girlfriend of five years, Stacy Reader, aren’t affectionate by nature, so she knew it was bad when Reader started squeezing her hand and reassuring her using her pet name, Squin. Tegan’s phone contains several close-up shots of her sister’s putty-clad nostrils. It's a perk of sharing a face that only one twin had to do it.
Elizabeth Weinberg for BuzzFeed News. Sara wears a black leather Day Birger et Mikkelsen shirt.
“Boyfriend” is one of Sara's songs, and it sounds like a right-to-reply from the silent partners of “I Kissed a Girl” or Demi Lovato's “Cool for the Summer.” “I let you take advantage 'cause it felt so good / I blame myself for thinking we both understood,” Sara sings seductively, before bursting into an anxious, sing-songy ultimatum: “You call me up like you would your best friend / You turn me on, like you would your boyfriend / But I don't wanna be your secret anymore.”
She didn’t intend it as a kiss-off. She was writing in part about Reader seeing a guy when they first met, and more broadly about gender identity and roles in all relationships, which inspired the video’s fluid, drag-inspired aesthetic: The Quins take turns getting gaudy makeup applied, and a giant motion-capture camera films them in close-up, miming along to the ridiculously catchy track. In the final, CGI-enhanced edit, the colors will swim across their faces. Sara says she’s ready for such an obviously queer pop song (she notes it name-checks The Crying Game) to strike a mainstream chord. “The idea of a guy being like, 'I totally relate to 'Boyfriend,' girls are always playing these games with me,' and I'm like, I know,” she says with an emphatic groan. “I think there's a part of me that wishes I lived in a world where it was like that.”
Fans won’t see this footage until the Love You to Death world tour, for which Sara has massive ambitions. Right now, they’re booked to play 4,000-capacity venues in major U.S. markets, but, she asks out loud: “By 2017 can we be one of the top headlining tours in the States or internationally? Can we be one of the top-billed artists at festivals in 2017? I would love to be up there with our peers, Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend. Maybe we can reach enough people that we can sell out a Madison Square Garden or an O2 Arena at some point. I want to believe that.”
Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2013’s Heartthrob, turned them from cult indie artists to actual pop stars, seven records into their career. It took a little convincing: The record's predecessor, 2009’s disjointed Sainthood, sounded like the work of a group that had fallen out of sync, but their then-label head told them there was massive mainstream radio potential in their new demos. (He’d worked with Kid Rock, and used the enjoyably inappropriate example of “All Summer Long” to show how an alternative artist could shift to the mainstream.) He challenged them about assuming there was a ceiling over their potential reach. “I was like, 'Well there is, quite literally,'” says Tegan. “I can't think of a gay woman that's on the pop charts. And they were like, 'Well why can't that be you?'”
Sara (left) Tegan (right)
They swept pop radio. The album went top three in the U.S. and Canada, “Closer” became their first top 20 single, and they won Junos (the Canadian Grammy) for Single, Group, and Pop Album of 2014. They performed the song with Taylor Swift on the Red tour in August 2013 (she baked them biscuits and jam), supported Katy Perry on the Prismatic Tour the following year, and reached millions more people when they sang “Everything Is Awesome” for The Lego Movie. But this time around, they want to be the main event.
Pop feels a bit like an arms race at the moment (see: Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” video) with power concentrated among a small few. You rarely hear established acts — let alone indie acts — speaking so honestly about their desire to muscle their way to the top. And even if more artists did, pop rarely works that way. Tegan and Sara are low-key stars, and have no intentions of becoming “Olympians,” as Sara admiringly describes Swift and company. But for them to demand more feels not only radical, but actually possible, and not only because Love You to Death is their strongest, catchiest record to date.
After years of butting up against the indie press poking fun at their sexuality and sisterhood, the Quins have found acceptance in the modern pop world, where strong, nontraditional personalities are in no short supply. As artists like Years and Years, Willow Smith, Halsey, Troye Sivan, and Frank Ocean have proven, gender and sexual fluidity is no longer seen as a limitation. At least at surface level, pop is as interested in social justice as the sisters have always been.
And the once-unusual online fandom that the twins have stoked for over a decade (their fans labeled themselves Tees or Esses) has become a cultural norm. Though some devotees, first drawn to the twins because they were outsiders, kicked back at their mainstream makeover: “Who even are you guys any more?” asked one fan when they announced they were opening for Katy Perry. They missed the point: Pop finally allowed Tegan and Sara to be themselves without apology.
The stars are aligned to get them where they want to go professionally, which is only possible because the Quins are closer than they’ve ever been. The sisters’ infighting and comic onstage bickering are part of the band’s lore, but the fact that they can now collaborate and manage each other’s anxieties finally makes them a proper united front at this pivotal moment. They have always joked that if they had been born as one person, they would be terrifyingly powerful, but Sara had always resisted that kind of association.
“Before we were even in a band I was filled with self-doubt about what I actually had to offer people besides looking like Tegan,” says Sara. “I've always carried that in our band and in our relationship. And so what if I just let go, and let Tegan have influence on what I do, and she lets me have influence on what she does?”
“We finally get to become the superhuman,” says Tegan.
Tegan (left) Sara (right) photographed in Los Angeles on March 18.
Elizabeth Weinberg for BuzzFeed News. Styling: Turner / The Wall Group. Hair: David Gardner / GRID Agency. Makeup: Garret Gervais / GRID Agency.
In a fancy bar atop the Pershing Square Building in Downtown L.A., the Quins are squinting at JPEGs on Tegan’s phone, figuring out last-minute changes for the lyric insert for the Love You to Death vinyl.
“I like the way it looks as LYTD,” says Sara.
“I understand that,” says Tegan.
“Love You to Death looks like that movie—”
“That’s the name of the record so let’s not implant weird associations.”
“—that movie—”
“Because it’s vinyl we can get away with it — we should put the whole name.”
Tegan and Sara have been a major label band for almost a decade, but still act like a DIY cottage industry, particularly when it comes to merchandise. They obsess over other bands’ stores so that they can give thorough plans to their label, Warner Bros., which Tegan describes as “the puppy that’s sitting outside waiting to be let in.”
Working with their creative director (and Sara’s ex-wife) Emy Storey, they cater to fans who treat them like a lifestyle, selling Tegan and Sara pencils, pillows, gym bags, journals, calendars, and mugs. For Christmas 2014, they made an ornament. Even Sara’s Scottish Fold cats, Mickey and Holiday, the real stars of the twins’ Instagram, have their own merch line: enamel pins and a set of cookie cutters in the shape of their faces. “There was a long period of time where I think that what we were doing did feel very revolutionary,” says Sara. “And now it feels very par for the course.”
Elizabeth Weinberg for BuzzFeed News
As queer women in an industry still largely ruled by straight, white men, they’ve always felt compelled to hold on to their business. “We didn’t wanna relinquish control and say, yep, you’re right, we’re just manufactured by the old label,” says Sara.
Over lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art earlier that afternoon, she makes clear that they don’t think of the way they approach their work as any kind of edict for other bands. “As we've gotten bigger and had more resources and access to these departments, we're just like, 'Oh, this is so fun — should we just run the record label?'”
“Sara and I consider ourselves efficiency experts,” says Tegan. “We feel we’d be really good at everything, and then show people a better and more efficient way to do it.” Sara’s dream is to turn around the U.S. Post Office, which she finds so upsettingly disorganized, she's discussed it with her therapist. Playing with a necklace she borrowed from her sister (and will later accidentally break), she relates it back to how she and Tegan approach their work. “We never let up. Nothing can ever just be OK. We're really controlling. We love being bosses, we love being leaders.”
Courtesy Tegan and Sara (4)
The instinct started early. The Quins grew up in a lower-middle-class, racially mixed part of northeast Calgary. Their parents divorced when they were 5. When they spent weekends at their dad's one-bedroom apartment, he took the couch while the girls shared his bed. At dinnertime, he would spin a globe and make them name the capital of whatever country their finger landed on. If they guessed right, they went to McDonald's. If not, they ate whatever was in the fridge. “Well, that was the joke,” says Tegan. “There was nothing in the fridge.”
As teenagers, they were high-achieving burnouts, who drank, smoked pot, and dropped acid during the school day (never together, so that they could babysit each other through the trips), but volunteered and studied classical piano. On the weekends, they would get into circle pits when bands like NOFX came through town. They picked up the guitar at age 15, and started writing together as Plunk, using the school photocopier to print the artwork for their cassettes.
They first attracted Canadian industry interest after winning a college battle of the bands (“Garage Warz”) while they were still in high school. It made the 17-year-old punks suspicious. Their mom, Sonia, who worked with at-risk teenage girls, told them to wait a year before signing anything, and when her only kids told her they were skipping college to pursue music, she made them take it seriously, driving them to coffee shops to hand out tapes and résumés. They held up their end of the bargain: They never touched drugs again, and never drank on the job. “It was a tough first year,” says Tegan.
Eventually, Universal Canada paid for them to make a demo. They got three tapes out of it — sought-after rarities Yellow Tape, Red Tape, and Orange Tape — but no deal. Still, the girls approached the producer about recording an independent debut album. “We had faith that if we made a record,” Tegan says, putting on a dramatic voice, “They would come.” They asked their grandfather, who had raised himself up from poverty through farming and remained incredibly frugal, for a loan of $10,000 CAD.
In April 1999, producer Jared Kuemper and the 18-year-old Quins set up a recording studio in Sonia’s crystal-strewn living room, and made Under Feet Like Ours. It's a time capsule that makes their love of Ani DiFranco obvious: crunchy guitars, angsty lyrics, husky over-enunciation, though their message is clear. “Freedom's rough / So we take our stand and fight for tomorrow,” they sing on “Proud,” while “Divided” recounts their mom sending them to a therapist during a particularly rough patch.
Elizabeth Weinberg for BuzzFeed News
A year later, Vapor Records, the label founded by Neil Young and his longtime manager Elliott Roberts, signed the band on the spot. Both sisters were already out, and Vapor encouraged them to be open about their sexuality, believing that they could become the voice of a generation.
“The climate when they started was not as it is today,” says Roberts. “They were very brave, and there was never any bones about what they felt or what they thought.” The first album was mostly re-recorded for their Vapor debut, 2000’s This Business of Art, which had a few new tracks. They were all but unknown when they performed a growly rendition of “My Number” on the Late Show With David Letterman, Tegan wearing a Tim Horton’s T-shirt.
That summer, they were invited to support Neil Young and the Pretenders in America, and studied the machinations of a well-run show. “Neil has his whole family on tour,” Sara says. “It felt like family. I remember thinking, This feels normal.”
They put the lessons into practice. A second loan from their grandpa, for $20,000, covered CDs and T-shirts for their first Canadian tour, which they mounted via Greyhound bus in 2001. They ran a tight ship, maintaining a show binder, a merch binder, and a logistics binder. After each show, one twin kept watch as the other fed dollar bills into ATMs. By the end of the tour, they had made $6,000 apiece, and put another $6,000 in the company pot. Their family’s financial conscientiousness had translated into serious business acumen. “When we got to Calgary, our grandpa said, 'You gonna put a down payment on your loan?'” says Tegan. “We said, 'No, here's the money.' Everyone felt so much pride.”
When the Quins secured the New Pornographers' John Collins and veteran Vancouver-based producer David Carswell to help their next album, 2002’s mostly acoustic pop-punk If It Was You, they offered the men contracts, because they wanted them to get royalties one day. This was a level of professionalism foreign even to established musicians a decade or so their senior. “We were still really stupid about the business end of it,” says Collins. “Those two young ladies were completely operating on another level.”
Elizabeth Weinberg for BuzzFeed News. Tegan (left) Sara (right): Tegan wears Unif jacket and sweater, ALC shirt, Loft pants, and Kurt Geiger sneakers. Sara wears Laer jacket, Saint Laurent pants, and Kurt Keiger shoes.