Talking about Sinead O'Connor, Death Cab for Cutie, and the
Replacements. 5-10-15-20: Tegan & Sara's Sara Quin
Welcome to 5-10-15-20, in which we talk to artists about the music
they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe
we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions
helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they
really liked hearing the "Mummies Alive" theme song over
and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.
For this edition, we spoke with Tegan and Sara's Sara Quin,
29.
The Juicy Fruits: "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye"
I know this from my mom and my dad telling me: Tegan and I were
absolutely 100% addicted to this record that my parents had, the
soundtrack to the film called Phantom of the Paradise. For shits
and giggles, it's actually worth checking out on the internet.
It was done in the 1970s, and it was in the same vein as The Rocky
Horror Picture Show. The soundtrack was all done by the songwriter
Paul Williams, who also starred in the film as this character Swan.
It's a rock opera, and he's the devil. So there are
ridiculous songs. It's out of hand.
Apparently, our favorite was this song called "Goodbye, Eddie,
Goodbye", which sort of starts the film. There's this band
called the Juicy Fruits, and they're at the height of their
fame. They sing the song, and it's all about a famous rock star
who gets into heroin and dies. We never actually saw the film
until… not really that much older, but not at five years old. Our
parents were not that reckless with our lives, but they did let us
dance to the record in our basement, and we apparently loved
it.
It's still, to this day, in a very strange way, one of my
favorite films. There's so much nostalgia associated with it
when I watch it. Tegan and I still listen to that soundtrack and
watch that film, and we feel like it's our childhood memories
all wrapped up in a weird, creepy rock opera. Actually, this is
another really geeky thing that I know about Phantom of the
Paradise: It was a Brian De Palma film, and it was not critically
accepted or liked or anything. It became a cult classic, and
apparently the soundtrack sold the most copies in Winnipeg.
There's a fan club. I know this because we talked about the
Phantom of the Paradise so much and we actually did a video where
we paid homage to it and ripped off this scene from Phantom of the
Paradise. The Phantom of the Paradise fan club picked up on it, and
they made us members and gave us T-shirts.
Sinead O'Connor: "Three Babies"
My dad and my mom were divorced at this point, but they both really
loved Sinead O'Connor. My dad would pick us up on the weekends,
and we would go to his house and listen to full albums. Like, we
would just sit in his apartment, and he would put on an album and
play the whole thing. He specifically really loved "Three
Babies". I can remember-- I mean, it's like it just
happened-- sitting in his apartment and him playing this album. It
was super intense, and my father had a really intense history with
his family. His mother was British, and there was a lot of struggle
in his life growing up. I don't remember exactly what he shared
of his personal life with us, but I definitely would correlate and
connect Sinead O'Connor and anything to do with British people
with my dad, and also this kind of intensity of sadness. It made a
huge impression on us.
We were absolutely surrounded by music. Our parents were young, and
they were huge music fans. Sinead O'Connor was something that
both my mom and my dad listened to, so if we weren't playing it
ourselves, it was being played around both houses. I remember on a
family trip, "Troy" being on a mixtape. I was begging my
mom and my stepdad to rewind it and play it over and over and over
again. And I remember stealing the tape from my mom's stereo
cassette player and playing it in my room. Our favorite thing was
our parents making mixtapes for us for our own private listening
satisfaction in our rooms.
Violent Femmes: "Add It Up"
This was the hardest age for me. I still listened to what my
parents listened to, but I also became 100% autonomous and started
picking what I wanted to listen to, going to gigs and music stores
and trying to find something new to listen to that wasn't my
parents' music. Probably the most relevant discovery around
that time was the Violent Femmes. Their debut record was
particularly popular for Tegan and I. I memorized the lyrics to
"Add It Up".
It was so popular at gigs and concerts to do the circle moshpit.
Girls would do it because you would just walk. It was sort of a way
to participate in the moshpit, but if you were five feet tall like
I was, you didn't necessarily want to be all elbows and
punching. I used to do that in my bedroom and sing the lyrics to
"Add It Up" so loud. Like, no shame, either. I can't
even begin to imagine what it would sound like from outside of my
bedroom. Or probably even more embarrassingly, I had windows fully
opened in my bedroom even through the winter; I loved it really
cool in my room. I just think of what it sounded like on the
street, me hollering hysterically to the song. I loved that song so
much.
Nobody I knew was listening to the Violent Femmes. We grew up in a
neighborhood where everybody was listening to hip-hop. The most
alternative music would have been electronic music for raves and
stuff. We were the only kids listening to punk rock and alternative
music, so this was a big discovery. Pre-internet, these things
weren't easy to find. I honestly don't remember how I came
upon the Violent Femmes. I had no idea that it had been released
when I was like three. I thought it was new. As far as I was
concerned, the Violent Femmes were punk music. I had heard punk
music, and I loved punk music and the traditional stereotype of
what punk music was. As far as I was concerned, this was just as
punk as anything I was listening to. In a way, it felt more punk
because there wasn't this obscuring of the vocals. You could
hear everything so clearly, and something really resonated about
that.
I grew up in Calgary, and there was a huge punk rock scene, bands
like NOFX and SNFU. There were all ages gigs on the weekend. The
bands mattered less; it was more about the community. The gigs were
usually done by Food Not Bombs. We'd be taking cans of mushroom
soup, and my mom would be like, "Sure! Just give it out to the
whole world!" And we'd be like, "But we need it to
get in! That's admission! It's less than money!"
I remember feeling really like outsiders in that world. We
weren't super punk rock in our dress. My mom had grown up in
the 1970s and was really alternative, so she let us go to the army
surplus store and buy big army military coats and boots. That was
as close to punk rock as we got. We didn't have our clothes
safety pinned or covered in Sex Pistols patches. The punk kids
seemed so passionate and so intense, and I really liked their
style, but I was nowhere near brave enough to ask my mom if I could
have a mohawk-- although I had my own bad styles of haircuts back
then that were worse than a mohawk. But I just remember loving the
scene, the violence of those shows. Our mom would pick us up from
the train station, and we would just be wrecked. Like, absolutely
damaged, covered in bruises. Half of my clothes would be ripped
off. We had a great time. [laughs] My mom must have thought we were
crazy.
Death Cab for Cutie: "For What Reason"
At that point, I had not made the connection that there was an
indie music scene. It sounds absurd now, but I was a Canadian kid
who didn't go to university, so I didn't ever really fit
into a college music/indie rock scene-- which would probably
explain some of the difficulty Tegan and I have had as a band. We
really do identify with that world and that scene, and yet we never
really fit into it because we never really experienced it. We broke
right out of high school and started touring, and it was around
2000 that I discovered Death Cab for Cutie and Pedro the Lion and
college radio music. I realized that that was a world of music that
I really wanted to explore and figure out.
This kid that I had grown up with had always been fairly advanced
in his music knowledge because he had a way older brother. In
elementary school, he talked about R.E.M., and then got really into
hip-hop and scratching. After high school, we didn't speak for
about a year or so, and then I ran into him and started talking
about music. He had completely left behind this world of
scratching, and he had discovered-- that's how he described it,
that he had "discovered"-- this other type of music. He
made me a mixtape, and it had like 50 songs on it; it was crazy. It
was short little snippets of things, and he was really going to
teach me or whatever. "For What Reason" was on that
mixtape, and it was definitely one of the highlights for me. It
became a mixtape staple for me for years. I would just put that
song on like every mixtape.
It wasn't as tough as alternative music in the 1990s. It was
less about production; it felt like a lo-fi production. It had
something that wasn't as aggressive. Once I had graduated from
high school and I was playing my own music and writing my own
music, I was sort of leaving behind this angsty mentality. I
wasn't listening to as much of the punk rock that I had been
listening to in high school, and I was looking for something was
maybe a little more mature and reserved. There was something about
the kind of melancholy, the adult male melancholy, that really
appealed to me.
Christopher Walla produced our last two records, and Jason McGerr
played drums on them as well. And we've toured with them, so I
know them pretty well. I think when I started hanging around with
Chris a bit, I was like, "Oh my god, I'm such a big Death
Cab fan" and kind of geeked out. But it's strange. I think
this happens a lot when you start to make friends with people who
make music or art. You almost start to think of them as two people.
Like, I still think of Death Cab as a band I don't know. Like,
I'm like, "Oh yeah, I love Death Cab for Cutie!" And
then I'm like, "Have you met my friends Death Cab for
Cutie?" There's no way I could connect those two
things.
The Replacements: "Unsatisfied"
I sort of wore that song out. I almost can't even listen to Let
It Be or that song anymore because I just listened to it so much. I
would randomly discover these bands and not know when they had
released their records. For whatever reason, I had completely
missed the Replacements. But we did a tour with Ryan Adams in 2002,
and we were geeking out talking about music one night. He started
talking about the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and Minor Threat, all
these bands, and I was like, "jeez, I don't know. It's
a black hole, a space. I never really got into any of that."
And the next day, he showed up with these stacks-- basically, the
discographies of all of those bands for me and Tegan. Like,
"Thanks Ryan!" He got us [Michael Azerrad's book] Our
Band Could Be Your Life, about the underground independent scene in
the 1980s.
So that was huge. That took up a couple of years for me. It
wasn't just like one band; it was all of those bands, and I
wanted to be able to know. I felt again like I was discovering
something as it had just happened because I had missed it. I
thought it was just so raw and so intense, super-tough for music
that isn't that tough. I love that "Unsatisfied" was
on an acoustic guitar, and I love how wild it was, that it
didn't even feel like there was a tempo. I just loved it.