In their new book High School and an album revisiting early demos, Tegan and Sara explore how their teen years shaped them — and me.
. With each entry in their oeuvre, Tegan and Sara settled into something glossier and more unabashedly pop. They opened for Katy Perry and shared stages with Taylor Swift. They won Junos and were twice short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize. Their singles would often edge into decent placement on top-40 charts.: to be at center stage, fill stadiums, have hits that would not only mingle passably on the charts but top them out. But again and again, the definitive, meteoric moment didn’t come.
The book is well written, if not exactly pyrotechnic. What it does well, though, is what good writing should: ItOn the page, Tegan and Sara have made their late-thirtysomething selves nearly invisible, resisting the urge to project forward in time and speak from the hard-won vantage of the present. Instead, in both emotional tenor and plot, their memoir stays firmly planted where its title promises: in actual, literal, real-deal high school.
Here’s where my teenage relationship to Tegan and Sara gets a bit muddled. If you were making guesses about my sexual orientation on the basis of my CD collection, it would have seemed like a no-brainer: Ani DiFranco, Tegan and Sara, Indigo Girls. My taste pulsed like a beacon. And yet I was, in spite of that, kind of boy-crazy.
A bright spot: seeing Tegan and Sara live on the main stage at the relatively small affair that was Capital Pride in Ottawa in 2002. A knot of friends and I went just to see them, arriving hours early to secure our place in front of the stage. The sun went down. Other musicians must have performed, but I have no memory of it. The emcee announced Tegan and Sara with the same quote A. had written on my copy of.
When I say musicians like Tegan and Sara meant the world to me, I mean that quite literally: These artists were emissaries and demigods, ambassadors from a place I couldn’t have told you I longed for. It wasn’t about whom or how they loved — it was what I saw as their way of moving through the world, what they demanded and what they didn’t need to. What I wished for without knowing it: to be free from my own desire to be desired. To have value beyond the attention of men.
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