Tegan And Sara Find Pain — And Unexpected Joy — In ‘High School’High

Tegan And Sara Find Pain — And Unexpected Joy — In ‘High School’

High school was a tumultuous time for Canadian identical twins Tegan and Sara Quin. They both, separately, were coming to terms with their sexuality — and they were also beginning to write and record songs together.

“Almost right away, we started to weave our voices together. That was something that we had an instinct to do,” Tegan says.

The music Tegan and Sara made in those early years helped jump-start their career. In 1998, when were 18, they signed a contract with PolyGram Records, which eventually led to a tour with Neil Young. They’ve since won awards for their music, including three Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy.

Now, the sisters revisit their early years with the memoir High School, along with the companion record, Hey, I’m Just Like You. The new record features songs they wrote as teenagers — but re-recorded as adults.

Sara was initially reluctant to listen to the songs they recorded in high school. “I was afraid that I would hear something that I that I would be embarrassed by or ashamed of,” she says.

But, she adds, “When I finally did listen, I was struck by the joy in our voices in our early recordings. … We were great, and we were writing these really sophisticated, adventurous songs as teenagers. And that was why we ended up signing a record deal as teenagers and starting our career.”

Tegan likens finding the balance between their teenage and present identities to mixing a cocktail: “We threw in a lot of different things from the last 20-some years, and hoped that if Tegan and Sara from 1997 could get in a time machine and hear it, that they wouldn’t be embarrassed by how we changed it.”