![]() I then wrote the rest of the song around that voice-note. I remember standing in the back alley in Echo Park singing the hook into her phone, and I was like, “Oh my God, either we have to go home or I have to keep this familiar.” I didn’t get a chance to record the song while I was in L.A., so I flew back to Vancouver and just would listen to the voice-note over and over. So when something sticks in your head, it’s like, stop the presses, you gotta get that down. We’re not big, bombastic vocalists coming up with repetitive vocal melodies is our thing. ![]() I didn’t have lyrics, all I had was the “I did behave” part, but I remember we got halfway to lunch and I was singing it, and I was like, “Give me your phone.” I recorded a voice-note because the hook was in my head, which was very exciting. I was killing time, my girlfriend was getting ready for lunch and she was taking a long time, so I was playing guitar and I came up with the chorus. It’s a strange song for me because I wrote the chorus in Los Angeles. Sometimes I just play songs for someone and I’ll ask, “Do you like the lyrics? If you could change the lyrics, would you?” I think I’m fearful of becoming too stuck in my ways and becoming redundant. ![]() But now I love it, maybe because we’re so far into our career or maybe because I have more confidence. I took any change as a criticism of the music I was making, so I found collaboration incredibly difficult, especially with Sara. Our first four of five albums were really hard for me because I found it really difficult to be given feedback. But even though it’s EDM, it’s truly a Tegan and Sara song. I was listening back to it, and it’s such a funny, weird song. It was a true collaboration there’s like two sections that Sara wrote, and three that I wrote. Sara and I were both so obsessed with him liking the song enough to put it on his record that we both were writing on it. We’d send our ideas to Tiesto and he’d write us back like, “Sing it more like this” or “I don’t like this lyric” or “You need to generate more emotion on this section.” It was really cool, kind of like a songwriting class. This was also the first time we’d co-written with somebody, so it was the first time someone was giving us feedback on what we’d written, but it wasn’t in the studio. “Feel It in My Bones,” Tiesto’s Kaleidoscope (2009)Įven though it’s not technically a Tegan and Sara song, I chose this because it was the first time Sara and I collaborated on a song that got released into the world. I have to kind of not look because it makes me very sensitive. It feels very emotional - lots of tears in the front row. Our musical director suggested doing it on piano, and it really transports me back to the first few times we played it live. It still feels the same performing it now, though obviously, we’ve updated it. When I say exactly how I feel, it really seems to connect. But that was the moment where I was like, no, no, this really is cathartic to sing this, to scream on stage every night, and watch everyone else scream along. Even when I wrote it, I remember calling Sara and her girlfriend in the middle of the night in Montreal and telling them to wake up and go listen, and I was like, “I think I wrote something really sad, accidentally.” It was very cathartic, which throughout the early part of our career, I had rejected that word - like when people would be like, “Do you find writing cathartic? It’s like reading out of our diary” - because I thought it was really sexist. It was sort of obvious right from the beginning that it was gonna be everybody’s sad, weepy breakup song. But this was probably the first song that I wrote that had a connection with the audience, which I hadn’t yet had a song accomplish. As an added bonus, they’ve shared some advice for songwriters.Īt that point, Sara had written “Walking With a Ghost,” and that had done really well for us. Oh yeah, did we mention that one run-in with some LEGO-ized statue named Oscar? Since the secret to their longevity can only be found in their discography, Vulture asked Tegan and Sara to pick the 10 best songs they’ve written. They’ve graduated from emo heartthrobs to queer influencers to pop songwriting elite without ever losing momentum. With their eighth album, Love You to Death, out Friday, boasting at least one viable Song of the Summer contender - not to mention some of the the year’s best songs, full stop - the Quin twins find themselves in rare territory. Even if you didn’t hear your first Tegan and Sara earworm until their 2004 breakthrough hit, “Walking With a Ghost,” by now, their canon of pop masterpieces has become even more inescapable. If you’ve been following Tegan and Sara since their debut album, 1999’s Under Feet Like Ours, you know they’re the type to make you love them to death.
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