When two become one
Their music careers are just beginning, but after 19 years together, twins Sara and Tegan sometimes they feel they need a marriage counselor, not a manager
Tom Harrison
The Province
VANCOUVER - 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 persons who are fated to live as one. I was convinced, anyway.
The twins are from Calgary. Two years ago, while still in high school, they were invited to play MusicWest in Vancouver. Chaperoned by their mother, they arrived as complete unknowns and left after a show at the Vancouver Press Club as one of the event's buzz acts. Recently, they returned 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 complained. “But we need a divorce.
“I don't think it's a healthy thing, at least for Tegan and I,” she continued. 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.
The song 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.
“I think so,” Sara agrees. “As you get to know us, for sure. 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.”