TEGAN & SARA.

This year is significant for Tegan and Sara for three important reasons: it marks their 20th year in the industry – a remarkable feat for any act – and it sees the release of their long-awaited ninth studio album, Hey I’m Just Like You, and joint memoir. “We realised how significant our story was and how little we hear women’s stories, especially queer women’s stories, and creative women’s stories,” says Tegan. “We’re constantly celebrating men’s creative genius but we rarely do that for women.”

Titled High School, the memoir chronicles the Canadian pop duo’s journey towards self-acceptance and bout with drugs and alcohol during their adolescent years; a significant period in their lives because it’s “where we had our first deep love, where we learned how to be artists, where we took our first creative steps”.

As they time-travelled back to their youth, they discovered an entire album comprised of demos that were written in their high school years. Despite having “sophisticated traumas and triumphs” since then, Sara explains that her “words at 17-years-old” still resonate deeply with her due to the record’s themes of love, heartbreak and teenage angst.

“We were talking perfectly about what will happen when you become an adult when you go different ways from your first love,” Tegan continues. “It just felt emotionally deep and mature and now as a writer, I would overcomplicate an idea like that. I feel like this record is opening up a whole new world for Tegan and Sara, so we can write differently moving forward.”

Here, we speak to Tegan and Sara about their memoir, working with a team of all women on its companion album and how the music industry is still as rife with sexism and homophobia since their debut in 1997.

I wanted to start off with the video for Hey, I’ll Be Back Someday – why did you choose to take it back to the 90s?

We’ve been really careful to play with the era in which these songs were written and crafted, and to pay homage to that time period without making it feel too nostalgic. When we discovered the music, there was lots of discussion of, ‘Oh, shall we re-record them totally 90s alternative-style, like the sound we were listening to at that time?’ We really didn’t want this to be seen as a novelty or a joke. We wanted it to be taken seriously as our next album, as a project that we put a ton of thoughtfulness and skill and energy into, as 38-year-olds living in 2019. So for us, making what feels like a modern pop record, but using techniques and using the instrumentation that we would’ve 20 years ago felt like an appropriate