Forget a therapist — twin act says it needs a marriage counsellor

By Tom Harrison

Music Reporter 

Music partners — and twins — Sara and Tegan try to explore their separate identities through music.

Sara and Tegan are twins but just how alike they are, I couldn't tell you.

I've only talked to Sara on the telephone and you'll have to take her word that they are two different people who are fated to live as one. I was convinced, anyway.

The twins are from Calgary. While still in high school, they were invited to play MusicWest in Vancouver two years ago.

Chaperoned by their mother, they arrived as complete unknowns and left after a show at the Vancouver Press Club (RIP) as one of the event's buzz acts.

They're returning Tuesday to play the Starfish Room with an album, Under Feet Like Ours, of shared songs and ideas that are spunky and ultimately disarming.

But it means that the lives of Sara and Tegan will be inextricable at a time when their therapist, among others, thinks they should be discovering life separately.

“We've been 19 years together, doing everything together, sharing everything, and now, after 19 years, our career is just starting,” Sara says. “But we need a divorce.

“I don't think it's a healthy thing, at least for Tegan and I,” she continues.

To illustrate what she means, Sara uses the making of the album as an example of the internal tension that also is part of their creative fuel.

“I was having trouble separating our professional life from our personal life. I was thinking, ‘We don't need a therapist, we need a marriage counsellor.’”

Resigned to continuing as a duo — they do like the music they make together, after all, and the blood is still a binding force — Sara and Tegan have resolved to find and express their identities from within their music.

A song such as Divided, which leads off the album, addresses that theme with some ambivalence. Written by Tegan, it expresses the need to slip away to a private world where you can be alone, be yourself, but also how lonely that world can be.

It's as if Tegan and Sara, who have been known to engage in open warfare with each other onstage, are trying to talk to each other through their songs. This also delineates the difference in their personalities.

“As you get to know us, for sure,” says Sara. “People assume that because our songs are on the same CD and appears under one name that it's all the same. But we're so different.

Sara cites one of her songs, Proud, as an example. A straightforward declaration, it also is built on a fairly conventional verse-chorus structure. In Sara's word, the more cerebral Tegan's songs are “messy,” and “she's anal retentive about her lyrics. She absolutely won't record a song until the lyrics are completed.

“When she got assigned to write our bio, I was horrified because there were so many run-on sentences and spelling errors.”

Even their work habits are different.

“Right now, Tegan is on a writing spurt. She's turning out a lot of stuff every day. I’m pretty much in a slump. We're not at home a lot so, when we're on the road, I use that as an excuse. But we're quite lazy that way, I would say.”

In concert

Sara and Tegan

Where: Starfish Room

When: Tuesday, 10 p.m.

Tickets: $8.40 from TicketMaster at 280-4444