Fanning the importance of Tegan and Sara
‘Modern Heartthrobs’ is not a bio, but rather a carefully curated chronicle of twins’ journey to date
On Feb. 22, 2015, Tegan and Sara performed their huge pop hit “Everything Is Awesome” at the Academy Awards to a global audience of 37 million people. The earworm, featured in “The Lego Movie,” had been nominated for Best Original Song.
Although the sisters did not go home with a golden statuette, it was a seminal moment for a duo that, according to author Melody Lau, “had fought long and hard to make a space for those who have been othered.”
Tegan and Sara Quin, identical twins born in Calgary in 1980, started their musical journey in high school during the late 1990s. Music bonded them as teens and is what still keeps them close today. In “Tegan & Sara: Modern Heartthrobs,” Melody Lau offers a well-researched take on this often misunderstood Canadian band.
Lau approaches her subjects through a lens filled with curiosity and empathy, honed from more than 15 years working as a music journalist. Using first-person interviews with both Tegan and Sara to anchor the narrative, then adding secondary sources and sprinkling in personal observations, a story unfolds of these indie darlings whom Lau describes as “pop’s invisible pioneers, queer forces who have fought long and hard to make a space for those who have been othered.”
As queer twins, Tegan and Sara have been open throughout their career about their sexuality and their identities. But, as Lau lays out in this book, the media’s portrayal of the duo over the decades has far too often zeroed in on this fact — taking the focus and conversation away from their music.
Here Lau explores the bigger story of how Tegan and Sara earned their place in Canadian popular culture: from grunge-loving teens finding their voices to 40-year-old veterans making melodic, intricate rock, who still have so much more to say.
Lau vaguely recalls the day when, as a teen, she first heard Tegan and Sara’s music. “Walking With a Ghost” blasted from her parents’ TV; it was playing on the popular and now defunct MuchMusic show “The Wedge.” Something about the melody and the words sung by the identical twins struck a chord.
“Watching ‘The Wedge’ is how I discovered many Canadian bands that I ended up loving, like Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Tegan and Sara,” Lau said via a Zoom interview the day before she was set to co-host an Instagram Live with Tegan. “After watching that video, I ran right out to the record store and bought ‘So Jealous.’ ”
Before penning this, her debut book, Lau had already interviewed Tegan and Sara frequently for such publications as MUCH, Exclaim!, Pitchfork and Billboard. She researched and wrote it during the pandemic and it’s the latest in the Bibliophonic series of music books, published by Invisible, a small notfor-profit press.
Despite the brevity of these titles
(most clock in at 150 pages or less), they dive deep into their chosen subjects: contemporary Canadian musicians who deserve a light shined on them for their impact and creative output. Past titles include: “The Dears: Lost in the Plot,” by Lorraine Carpenter; “NoMeansNo: Going Nowhere,” by Mark Black, and “Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures,” by Chilly Gonzales.
“Del Cowie, who I used to work with at CBC, had just taken over as the editor at Bibliophonic, and he approached a few people to pitch him ideas,” Lau explained.
“I was the one who was the fastest to respond. At the time, Bibliophonic only had a handful of music titles and we both identified there were not a lot of diverse artists being covered … meaning not enough people of colour and not a lot of women. We batted around a few ideas and it was Del who brought up Tegan and Sara, not knowing I was obsessed with them as a teenager.
“I had been following them since ‘So Jealous’ and started interviewing them every album cycle since ‘Heartthrob,’ so I had a pretty good base knowledge of them, but believed there was enough there still to learn and it would be a good challenge.”
In “Tegan and Sara: Modern Heartthrobs,” the Toronto-based writer, who still works full-time at CBC, traces the identical twins’ career with a combination of objectivity and subjectivity. Initially she was reluctant to inject her voice — she’s a journalist after all — but gradually began to weave in personal anecdotes and opinions, entering the narrative where it fits and to give added context.
“It was not my choice,” Lau said. “My editor nudged me … it’s not something I do in my day job. As music journalists we are told not to make the story about you; stay objective. When it was flipped and I was asked, ‘How much of yourself are you comfortable putting in this book?’ I was uncomfortable with it. But, by draft three or four, I was putting more of myself in without taking the attention away from Tegan and Sara.”
Tegan and Sara’s music and their openness about their sexuality have broadened the conversation about LGBTQ artists but, said Lau, there is still a ways to go.
“I am always surprised by how empathetic and compassionate they (Tegan and Sara) are toward people,” Lau said. “When I started working on this project I was reading all of the negative press from the 1990s and 2000s and I was getting angry on their behalf. The first time I talked to Sara we spent two hours just talking about sexism in the music industry.
“The ability to forgive the nastiness that was aimed at them early in their career, sometimes unintentionally — people didn’t know how to write about twins who were also queer — took a long time to get there, and arguably there is still a lot of work to be done in music journalism and the way we write about artists. But they’ve been kind to people and don’t hold on to those grudges. That’s something I aspire to.”
Twenty-four years since Tegan and Sara Quin formed their first band, the duo is as active as ever and gaining new allies and fans. “Tegan and Sara” tells the story of the dynamic pair as it stands in 2022.
Seven years since that memorable night when the band took to the stage at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, everything for these sisters does seem truly “awesome.” Their 10th album, “Crybaby,” arrives Oct. 21 and a TV series based on their New York Times bestselling memoir “High School” comes to Amazon Freevee in the U.S. this fall.
As Sara tells Lau at the end of the book, “We’re just getting started.”