No rest for the wicked — Calgary’s favourite musical twins, Tegan (or Sara, l) and Sara (or Tegan, r) Quinn.

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Tegan and Sara with An Horse
Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
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More in: Rock / Pop

For the past 10 years, twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quinn’s music has teetered between the mainstream and the underground, the emotional and the intelligent. Never content to merely rest on catchy melodies and the rhythmic momentum of their words, the duo has experimented with varying shades of production on its albums, sometimes swinging hard towards lush power pop (as on 2005’s platinum-selling So Jealous), and sometimes the kitchen-sink scatterbrained sound collage of 2007’s The Con.

For every moment of unabashed sentiment in the pair’s music, there is a moment of calculated self-awareness, like the sisters are following their hearts, but constantly keeping themselves in check for fear of becoming something they didn’t intend. Sara admits that it was the inexplicable emergence of their career at a young age that spurred on this self-awareness, and now, with their latest release, Sainthood, Tegan and Sara are finally letting go of their fixation on the mystery of their art, and just letting the songs be songs.

“We sort of accidentally were this band, in some weird way,” Sara admits. “There were years where I would feel this awkwardness about what I was, and if I was doing the right thing. But I think [Tegan and I] were always intuitively following our guts about things, and whatever second-guessing I was doing, we still kept moving forward and I’m so grateful. I almost saw our career as a snowstorm, like we were constantly fighting our way towards something, but we didn’t know what. All of a sudden it feels like we’re in a spot that’s clear and there’s a real break and a real momentum and confidence about being on the right path and being OK.”

While Tegan and Sara have tried their hand before at anthemic pop songs (much of So Jealous can be considered fist-pumping), never has the pair been more direct and open in its lyrics and songs as on Sainthood. Rather than dwell on specific but out-of-context references and stories with some emotional qualifiers, à la Ani DiFranco, the album’s attention is turned outward, asking the listener whether they’ve ever felt it, too.

“I don’t feel like it’s background music,” Sara says of the album. “I feel like [the listener] should go to a concert and sing along or lay in your bedroom and cry because somebody broke your heart. I want it to be music where I’m speaking on your behalf; I’m not the paint on your walls, I am not an environment, I am a statement, and I feel that way.”

Sara describes Sainthood as an exercise in subtraction, a space where all of the pondering and examining of emotions have fallen away, leaving only the experience of the emotion itself, raw and unmitigated by thought. It lends the album a sense of immediacy and urgency that the two have never before achieved, and injects their minor key songwriting style with the energy necessary to make each of the songs madly addictive. Though she says she has plenty of love and attention for weird math rock and experimental music “that would make a seagull’s head blow off.” Sara tells me it’s always been in-your-face pop songs that have most affected and inspired her over the years. This realization greatly informed the tone of the album.

“The albums I go back to from my childhood are ones that slap you over the head with a crazy melody that by the second chorus you are singing along,” she says. “I like what’s going on in R&B and in hip hop — people like Alicia Keys, The Dream, Rhianna. Those people are not embarrassed. They don’t walk around going ‘What will people think of me.’ They just fucking make music, and I love that.”