Just Popping By

23 April 2013 | 6:15 am | Ben Preece

"With this record, it felt like we’ve experienced so much growth over the last six years writing with other people, we needed to take that growth to the next level internally."

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Heartthrob is the new record from Tegan & Sara, a name that's been closely associated to some of the most perfect indie pop the music world has seen in the last decade or so. Their tracks have been featured all over TV shows and been covered by the likes of The White Stripes, they've written songs for the likes of Lisa Loeb and Carly Rae Jepsen and collaborated with other artists – everyone from Tiesto and Theophilus London to The Reason and Against Me!

But it would seem for their seventh album, the Quin twins have traded the guitars and often angsty vocals for synths and delivered something, well, a lot more polished, definitely more produced and something that lands well and truly in the commercial pop world. Tegan Quin (the older by eight minutes) certainly would never call it selling out and she's believable – the pair have been flirting with pop melodies and structures for years, coming closest on 2009's Sainthood with a track called Alligator, a song that danced around much like Madonna's Holiday.

“You know what?” Quin muses. “It's funny, being so intimate with our music and the intricacies of it, it's not actually too removed from the past. I am not trying to, in any way, minimise how different Heartthrob really sounds but [2004's] So Jealous and [2007's] The Con and Sainthood were actually quite keyboard-heavy, but we just had quite a lot of guitar in there as well. I don't know, it just feels like one of those things, that over time, a record just develops. Even those older ones and the songs off So Jealous and The Con have really evolved over the years as we've been touring and travelling and developing as artists, so the songs don't seem like that big of a shift. Last night we went from [Heartthrob's] Goodbye, Goodbye to [So Jealous'] Where Does The Good Go to How Come You Don't Want Me, another new song and it was effortless. There's some math of change of production on Heartthrob but it's still quintessential Tegan and Sara, they still have those very heavy emotional elements while juxtaposing it with upbeat melody and, in this case, a lot of upbeat rhythms and stuff.”

To up the ante this time around, the sisters called upon the assistance of Greg Kurstin, a producer and musician who has a varied and star-swollen resume that includes the likes of Beck, Sia, The Shins, Ke$ha and Kelly Clarkson.

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“Greg Kirsten really does hurdle over both worlds quite effortlessly,” Quin explains. “He's an incredible musician, playing with incredible acts like Beck for ten years and just an incredible artist, a really great writer and seems to just have an enormous respect for artists and writers and specifically, we were interested in him because he'd worked predominantly with women and female vocalists. He had just finished making The Shins' record too and I was like, 'Ok, this guy can work with like Ke$ha and Kelly Clarkson one week and be like making The Shins' record – this is our guy.' One of the first songs I played for Greg was I Was A Fool and the demo was just me playing piano and there was a little bit of acoustic guitar strumming. All the other producers we'd reached out to were like, 'Oh, just keep that organic and acoustic and maybe put an orchestra on it,' and Greg swung around after the first chorus and was like 'this is a pop song, this is huge, I'd just turn this into a massive pop song,' and I felt like this was our guy. That's what you need after fourteen years, someone who just sees the other side.”

Even the demoing process was a completely different one when compared to how Tegan & Sara have worked in the past.

“When we started writing music for the album, Sara immediately was not interested in doing anything guitar-heavy or even demoing and writing on one,” Quin reveals. “So that was definitely an influence on the demos – the first couple of songs that we wrote, like Now I'm All Messed Up, I Couldn't Be Your Friend and Closer, we just gravitated towards piano. We also instinctually wanted to collaborate more than we have in the past, so Sara and I ended up sending songs back and forth with big open spaces. Sara made lyrical and melody choices for me and wrote all of the bridges on all of my songs. So it was a lot more collaboration, so the demos didn't stick out as much as usual as, you know, this is a Sara song and this a Tegan song.

“In the past, we've always felt we needed to take that space from each other to write; writing is a very solitary and meditative experience. With this record, it felt like we've experienced so much growth over the last six years writing with other people, we needed to take that growth to the next level internally. I think Heartthrob was the response to that as well. I wanted to figure out if there was a way to bridge those two worlds. We are really comfortable in the indie world but I also was seeing this amazing trend where indie musicians were crossing over into pop, you know, bands like Gotye, Fun., Florence + The Machine and The xx were having major commercial success and so I thought that if pop was ready for a little emotional depth and integrity, then I want to be there. That's how that came up with it all.”

It would seem the crossover in sound hasn't harmed the duo's following any; they tend to generate the most rabid of fans that seemingly follow them anywhere they choose to dive. Quin is very aware of the connection between the fans and their music and cites it as number one.

“We are constantly reminded of that by them [the fans]. They constantly tell us that it's us and the stories and they relate to the words. If anything, my fear with Heartthrob was that maybe it was heavy on the production and they'd miss the real substance that this record holds. I think songs like How Come You Don't Want Me and Now I'm All Messed Up and I Couldn't Be Your Friend and I Was A Fool, these are the best songs we've ever written and, if anything, the production has allowed us to really push those songs to the extreme.

“I was less concerned with this one, I remember when we went from So Jealous to The Con in 2007 and I was way more worried, because we went from having one little keyboard on stage to having four keyboards on stage. So we transitioned years ago on actually feeling like a guitar-driven band and the perception was still that we were that guitar-driven band, when we'd actually been collaborating with dance artists for the past six years. Even on Sainthood, there were four tracks on that record that didn't have one guitar on it, you know, Nightwatch and Paperback Head and Alligator, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't feel that worried so much as I felt crazy anticipation and excitement just to step off the ledge. I felt like we'd been teetering on the edge for a long time and kind of circling pop music and pop arrangements for a while since maybe The Con with songs like Back In Your Head and then again with Alligator and a lot of the collaborative work. I really trust our audience, I feel they've really come to us from really different places – we haven't really had a big single in such a long time, and yet I still feel our audience has still been growing and growing organically. So I feel, in a strange way, they're the ones that kind of created this record, they're the ones who encouraged us and supported us through all these different collaborations and different sounding records, so I don't know, I was more just anxious and excited to hear what they thought. You lose fans with every record, but you also gain new fans so you can't worry too much as long as we do our best to infuse our records with as much integrity and thoughtfulness, I think we keep majority of fans happy.”

INFLUENCING HEARTTHROB

There's not exactly a lot out there that sounds like Tegan & Sara, so influences are hard to spot immediately. Sure, a couple of years ago they borrowed heavily from Madonna's Holiday and clearly identify with their contemporaries crossing over largely from the indie world to the pop stratosphere, but it's still surprising to learn just what Tegan Quin was spinning when writing for their seventh album, Heartthrob.

“I think that Erasure and Ace Of Base were both huge influences on us growing up; those two are probably the ones that get the most eyebrow lifts. But I also listened to a lot of early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and probably the thing that influenced the majority of what I wrote was Kate Bush, actually. I've been a fan over the years but my step-dad gave me his whole record collection from the '70s and '80s a couple of years ago and I hadn't had time to dig into it, I just started devouring a lot of the '80s music he owned. A lot of it I didn't even remember listening to growing up and I was like, 'Oh my God, these vocals and interplay and melodies' – it was just like vocal gymnastics and was all over the place. I just thought that all this music sounded so fun and interesting but also so dark at the same time.
“I remember about a year ago and reading up on some early Tom Petty and a song like American Girl, to me, just feeling so dark, but it comes off as so easy-listening, fun and awesome. It brought back some really great memories but when we started diving back into these early-'80s records, I was surprised that there was actually a lot of depth in pop music. There was a little doubt and a lot of intensity and political and social commentary. I just thought we shouldn't shy away from that in our own music.”

Tegan & Sara will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 25 April - Concert Hall, Opera House Sydney
Friday 26 April - Concert Hall, Opera House Sydney
Saturday 27 April - Groovin' The Moo, Maitland Showground
Sunday 28 April - Groovin' The Moo, University Of Canberra
Tuesday 30 April - The Tivoli, Brisbane
Thursday 2 May - Palais Theatre, Melbourne
Saturday 4 May - Groovin' The Moo, Prince Of Wales Showground, Bendigo
Sunday 5 May - Groovin The Moo, Murray Sports Complex, Townsville
Tuesday 7 May - Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide
Thursday 9 May - Metro City, Perth
Saturday 11 May - Groovin' The Moo, Hay Park, Bunbury