Tegan And Sara
Photo: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images
"Answering Complicated Questions With Simple Answers": Tegan And Sara Recount Music & Identity
"In my final years of high school, I recognized that there was a passion. Music was so interesting to us, the culture of music was very interesting to us," Sara from Tegan and Sara told the Recording Academy in 2014 about a time way before they saw success as indie artists. "We just didn’t know anybody that made music for a living."
The sisters are now releasing a memoir titled High School that will recount the beginning of their music career, but also their upbringing, including their parents' divorce, growing up during the '90s rave and grunge culture and their experiences with their sexuality.
The GRAMMY-nominated twin singer/songwriters and musicians from Calgary, Alberta, Canada have become not only one of the most successful and well-known duos in the indie pop scene—selling over one million records and releasing eight studio albums—but also icons in the LGBT community as both have been open about their queer identity.
"How did you start your band? When did you know that you were gay? What were you like before Tegan and Sara? We have spent twenty years answering those complicated questions with simple answers,” said Tegan and Sara in statement. “Writing High School gives us the opportunity to tell the intricate stories that shaped our relationship as sisters, musicians, and queer girls.”
High School, a memoir by Tegan and Sara, to be published fall 2019. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, it tangles itself up in the parallel and discordant memories of two sisters growing up down the hall from one another. pic.twitter.com/Z2FGsMC6jn
— Tegan and Sara (@teganandsara) December 11, 2018
The memoir will be written as alternating chapters from both Tegan and Sara's perspectives and will cover love, drugs, music and friendship during the years that shaped them the most.
The two artists began playing music during a time where indie artists didn’t have the internet as a platform to share. Post high school, Sara remembers not knowing music could be a career. She reminisced with the Recording Academy:
"We were graduating in 1998, so this is very pre-internet, kind of days for us. I didn't even really realize that there were bands, like indie rock bands or whatever, making a living, so it really only started to happen maybe when I was in my early 20s, maybe 23, 24, 25 that I started to think, 'Oh my God, like, this is our career, like we're actually doing this, we don't have to go get another job now.' So, we sorta fell into it and I don't think there was as much pre-meditation as people have these days."
The book is scheduled to be released in Fall 2019. Their ninth studio album will begin to be recorded in 2019 also.
