by Sara Quin
Sara and I played three shows while we were there, inviting a few industry people we knew who’d stayed in touch since New Music West. We did well, but somehow I left Toronto feeling less sure about things. “Don’t get stuck here,” one A&R urged us after the final gig. “Sign a deal in America if you can. Even a small label would have a vested interest in letting you develop. You need time, time a major label won’t give you.” It was the absolute best advice we ever got. But how do you get a deal in America when you live in Calgary? I worried as we headed home. I returned to my coffee shop job with Bridgette that fall, and felt a growing hopelessness take root in me with every coffee I made.
We recorded the two remaining demos PolyGram had contacted us to make. But the six songs didn’t induce much excitement at the label. When Bryan left PolyGram shortly after, no one offered to sign us. We were officially on our own. The engineer who recorded those demos was named Jared Kuemper. He was young, finding his footing like we were, and said that for eleven thousand dollars we could rent a Pro Tools rig and make a whole record in our mom’s house, without the need for a studio, a tape machine, or a massive soundboard. We’d own the recording, just like our songs, and we could sell the record, or license it to a label, and keep control over ourselves, our image, our sound—all things we’d have to forfeit if we signed a record deal. Sara and I agreed that this was what we wanted. We convinced Grampa to lend us the money to make the record, after we passionately explained, while Mom and Gramma looked on, we weren’t just going to be artists; we were going to be business owners.
“We’ll play shows every night and sell the CD and pay you back,” we vowed.
I felt invigorated again, and with my bank account fat with the money to pay Mom my half of the rent she charged Sara and me every month to live in the basement, I convinced Bridgette to quit Grabbajabba with me. On Christmas Eve we tossed our oversize work shirts at the owner and I never looked back or got another job again.
Alex came home at Christmas and told me she was miserable in France without me. The depth of her depression reassured me she wasn’t moving on. The next three weeks we were together I felt drunk in love. Everything felt right again. But when she left in January, it was easier—the first red flag that things were starting to change between us.
That winter Sara and I wrote and rehearsed every night in the basement suite of Mom’s house when we weren’t out hosting open mic nights or playing our weekly coffee shop gig. Fighting viciously as we tried to prepare for the recording, I spent the afternoons while she was at work stuffing manila envelopes and mailing them to folk festivals and clubs across Canada to try to get us more gigs. A friend designed us our first website, and I created an email account for us where I diligently responded to every fan letter and inquiry that came into its mailbox from Mom’s impossibly slow PC in her office upstairs.
In the spring we recorded our first album with Jared with the loan from Grampa. We took over the first floor of Mom’s house for a month to make it. Every morning I crackled out of bed like lightning and raced upstairs to eat breakfast and wait impatiently for Jared to arrive and Sara to get up.
When it was done, we called the record Under Feet Like Ours. Newly obsessed with carving our own path, we felt the name embodied the spirit of our desire to go it alone, without a label. The record starts with a clip from a cassette tape from when we were four years old. “It’s my tape recorder,” Sara says.
“Yeah, talk like that so when you’re eighteen you can hear what a brat you were,” my mom quips. Then the first notes of “Divided” start, a song I’d written about the friction growing between Sara and me about our future: “There’s something so divided. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Don’t live your life for me or for anyone. You live your life as if you’re one.”
When the first box of fifty CDs arrived on Mom’s front porch, I cut it open outside as Sara and Zoe watched over my shoulder from the doorway. I pulled out a CD, placed it in my hand, and stared at it in awe. Sara and I had managed to accomplish something that I knew some bands never would. I felt proud as I examined it that warm May day as the girls watched from behind me. It would take us a long time to find success, to sell records, to win awards, to be acknowledged by our peers, the industry, and the world. But at that moment, years from any of that, I felt my first taste of success.
(SARA) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my dearest friends: No one is thrilled to learn that their most difficult years are being mined for a memoir. And yet, so many of you generously allowed for your private experiences to be written about in these pages. Without your support, there would be no words, no music, no book.
To Mom, Dad, and Bruce: I won’t apologize for the LSD, but without your love and guidance, I would never have found my way through any of it.
To Sean, Nita, Naomi, and Sarah: Thank you for believing in the story we were trying to tell.
To Marc, who told me ten years ago we’d know when it was time to write a book: Thank you for that wisdom.
Piers, Nick, and Kim: With your management, we had the confidence to make space to try something new.
Stacy, my best listener, and Emy, my first reader: I love you both.
Tegan: Thank you for always carrying half the weight of the world.
To every brave person I’ve met over the last twenty years who has shared a story about coming out: This book is for you.
(TEGAN) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is with incredible gratitude that I thank my friends from high school. The laughs you delivered this past year, as well as the photos, journals, notes, and memories you unearthed, were the seeds I used to grow my part of the book. Thank you for trusting me with them and for finding me in our youth and sticking with me in adulthood.
To Mom, Dad, and Bruce, though you never signed up for the exposure that comes with being the parents of public people, you have handled it with so much grace. My greatest hope is that anyone who reads this book will come to the conclusion I have—nothing in my life would have been possible without each of you clearing the path for me to achieve all that I have.
To Sofia, thank you for letting me read you every verbose and bloated chapter I wrote. Even though you were clear that you preferred to read the stories yourself, I love that you let me disregard what you wanted to get what I needed.
To Nita and Naomi, thank you for the patience you showed as you carved out what Sara and I set out to tell, even as we threatened to bury ourselves in unnecessary details and an excess of characters and stories.
To Sean, thank you for believing we had a story worth telling from those first half-dozen chapters we let you read. And thank you for fighting to have our names come alphabetically and for the guidance and wit you produced along the way.
To Sarah, thank you for your encouragement and enthusiasm through each draft.
To Piers, Nick, and Kim, thank you for letting us abandon music to write a book only to find our passion for music again. And thank you for protecting the perimeters of our lives to ensure we have the time and space to do what we do.
To Marc, thank you for your early belief in us. And for the light trickery you used to get us to write the proposal in the first place.
To Sara, thank you for elevating, enriching, and improving everything I set out to accomplish in my life. I endeavor to always do the same for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTOGRAPH BY TREVOR BRADY
During the course of their twenty-year career, Tegan and Sara have sold more than one million records and released nine studio albums. They have received three Juno awards, a Grammy nomination, and a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and were honored by the New York Civil Liberties Union. They have performed on some of the world’s biggest stages, from Coachella to the Academy Awards. Outspoken advocates for equality, in 2016 Tegan and Sara created the Tegan and Sara Foundation, which fights for health, economic justice, and representation for LGBTQ+ girls and women. The sisters currently reside in Vancouv
er, British Columbia.
TeganandSara.com
TeganandSara
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Sara-Quin
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Tegan-Quin
@SimonSchusterCA
ILLUSTRATIONS
p. 2: Tegan still makes this face when she cries
p. 4: Tegan and Sara, four years old
p. 8: Mom with Sara
p. 8: No one can tell us apart in this photo
p. 9: Our first birthday party
p. 10: Sara and Tegan celebrating Easter with Mom and Dad
p. 10: Sara and Tegan were paid to wear these dresses
p. 11: Mom’s graduation from college; Tegan in stripes
p. 11: Sara cutting holes in her jeans
p. 11: Mom looking chic in 1987 when she started dating Bruce
p. 18: Celebrating our fifteenth birthday with Dad
p. 18: Tegan high on acid in her bed with Naomi
p. 19: Tegan’s signature look, with Naomi and Bruce on Naomi’s birthday
p. 19: Tegan and Christina search for the correct spelling of Mussolini
p. 20: Sara in her favorite Nirvana T-shirt
p. 20: Tegan’s school photo
p. 20: Tegan and Sara high on acid at Christina’s Halloween party
p. 21: Tegan stealing shots of vodka at Grampa’s bar
p. 21: Bartending at Gramma and Grampa’s New Year’s Eve party
p. 116: Sara posing for Bruce
p. 116: Tegan posing for Bruce
p. 117: Sara and Tegan waiting for Bruce to drive them to school
p. 118: Tegan working at the Renfrew house in the summer
p. 118: At Christina’s, likely wheeling and dealing
p. 119: Kicking Tegan’s ass at Alex’s house
p. 119: Makeshift bedroom in the living room before we moved (Tegan, Sara)
p. 136: Sara’s grade eleven school photo
p. 136: Tegan’s grade eleven school photo
p. 136: Sara and Tegan with Naomi on their surprise sixteenth birthday (Sara, Naomi, Tegan)
p. 137: Working hard in Broadcasting class (Cameron, Naomi, Stephanie, Spencer, Sara)
p. 137: Sara and Tegan drunk at Rick’s house
p. 138: Sara working on a new song at Naomi’s
p 139: Tegan, the early filmmaker
p. 139: Spencer
p. 139: Sara on a school trip to the Calgary Zoo
p. 218: Sara passed out drunk at Naomi’s
p. 218: Sara taking a nap while they wait for a flight to Vancouver
p. 219: Drama festival at university; Sara in Alex’s rainbow toque
p. 219: Sara, Spencer, and Christina at Grace’s house for a party
p. 220: Annual family vacation to Vancouver Island (Sara, Tegan)
p. 220: Dueling acoustics (Sara, Tegan)
p. 221: Mom and Tegan on a boat
p. 221: Forcing another concert on our friends at Christina’s (Sara, Tegan)
p. 238: Our seventeenth birthday (Tegan, Sara)
p. 238: Sara putting Tegan to sleep with her stories at their graduation after-party at Stephanie’s house
p. 239: Stephanie and Sara after a few drinks
p. 239: Naomi and Sara in the kitchen
p. 239: Sara with a giant binder in the hallway at school
p. 239: Tegan’s self-portrait, student center
p. 240: Tegan carrying one guitar to the Garage Warz semifinal
p. 240: Onstage at the Garage Warz final (Tegan, Sara)
p. 241: In Sara’s bedroom with the TV crew after Garage Warz
p. 241: Dad wears a “help” tie to our graduation
p. 344: Tegan and Sara onstage at the Ship & Anchor
p. 345: Sara, Mom, and Tegan next to a small tree stump on Vancouver Island
p. 345: Our eighteenth birthday party with fresh haircuts (Tegan, Sara)
p. 346: Tegan looking moody, recording vocals for Under Feet Like Ours
p. 346: Sara in a fort made of blankets in Mom’s living room
p. 347: Take Back the Night; Sara is wearing an old man’s slippers and Tegan has leopard socks
p. 347: Getting along very well (Tegan, Sara)
Simon & Schuster Canada
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166 King Street East, Suite 300
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1J3
www.SimonandSchuster.ca
Copyright © 2019 by Tegan and Sara
“You Suck” written by: The Murmurs © MCA Records. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Lyrics used by permission, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
The names and certain other details of many characters appearing in High School have been changed.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Canada Subsidiary Rights Department, 166 King Street East, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M5A 1J3.
This Simon & Schuster Canada edition September 2019
SIMON & SCHUSTER CANADA and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-268-3216 or [email protected].
Interior Design by Abby Kagan
Jacket photo by Bruce MacDougall
Cover design by Emy Storey
Hand lettering by NA Kim
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: High school / Tegan Quin and Sara Quin
Names: Quin, Tegan, 1980– author | Quin, Sara, 1980– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190077344 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190077395 | ISBN 9781982112660 (hard cover) | ISBN 9781982112684 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Tegan and Sara—History and criticism. | LCSH: Musicians—Canada—Biography. | LCSH: Quin, Tegan, 1980- | LCSH: Quin, Sara, 1980-
Classification: LCC ML421 T262 2019 | DDC 782.42164092/2—dc23
ISBN 978-1-9821-1266-0
ISBN 978-1-9821-1268-4 (ebook)
