It’s a beautiful Thursday in Denver when Sara Quin calls up. She’s still coming down from her and twin sister Tegan’s Aug. 20 appearance on stage with Taylor Swift at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
The duo’s Polaris Prize-shortlisted seventh album, Heartthrob, is apparently one of Swift’s favourites and the Internet is exploding with videos of the performance.
“We were really excited to be asked and she is legitimately a fan who has spoken generously about the project previously over the lifespan of the album cycle to date,” Quin says.
“There wasn’t always a camaraderie around us with other artists’ support in the past and — not to sound all high school in a ‘why don’t they like us?’ way — it’s been totally different with Heartthrob.”
If the language of “lifespan” and “product cycle” doesn’t sound like the usual commentary coming from your indie rocker du jour, that’s because it isn’t. Both the sisters are fiercely business savvy, and their increased public profile is the result of planning, not luck.
With the change in the duo’s sound, which began with the previous more pop- and dance-oriented Sainthood, Tegan and Sara are setting their sights far higher than being the beloved soundtrack of bummed-out, heartbroken 20-somethings and highschoolers.
“We’ve experienced some mini-surges in the past in our career, but this is something very different,” Quin says.
“We’re getting more airplay, more opportunities to collaborate and playing much larger shows. I’m proud of what we accomplished with all of our previous records, but our goals have changed from the time that we were 20 years old and we see the opportunities now that might have been unavailable in the past.”
As she notes, if the band has a timeline with an end to it, she wants to have a lot of things checked off the list that she and her sister drew up after finishing the lengthy Sainthood tour.
Among the main priorities:
■ Getting more radio play, which Closer has done for them;
■ Playing festivals in the dark, not in broad daylight; headlining the second stage at Coachella this summer did that;
■ Getting better opening slots (try The Killers tour), as well as bigger venues as headliners. In Denver, the band has two nights in a row. Similar such demand is occurring along the tour.
“I want to make sure that we accomplish all that we want to accomplish and leave with no regrets. Being kids of the ’90s, we were so obsessed with focusing on ourselves and not selling out. We might not have seen how success and still speaking out about things that matter to us, being gay, politics and so on, weren’t mutually exclusive.
“Whatever happens, we’ll still be Tegan and Sara. I don’t think we’ll ever be putting on one of those remarkable acrobatic/dancing/near-Olympic-sport-style arena shows that Madonna, Taylor Swift and P!nk do. We will put together something that presents us as what we are; singer-songwriters who want to tell you stories.”
Now they are looking at how to tour more in international markets such as Asia and South America. A short tour of India produced an entertaining DVD and Sara would like to bookend that with something much bigger. On a personal level, she doesn’t think she and Tegan owe anyone an answer for why they want to be more successful — save, perhaps, the mother who raised them to achieve the most they could with their art and worked hard to give them the opportunity to pursue musical careers.
sderdeyn@theprovince.com
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In concert
Tegan and Sara & fun.
Where: Ambleside Park, West Vancouver
When: Saturday, 4 p.m.
Tickets: $45 at livenation.com
