Date: January 2003 Author: Patrick Russell Publication: pomn.com Headline: N/A

Tegan and Sara come from Canada. They are regular, plain old Canadians who happen to be twins, and who happen to, just by circumstance, be girls. They also just happen to rock harder than your Mom singing Jesus’ praises in church on Sunday. The last time Tegan and Sara were in Portland they opened for Ryan Adams at the Roseland and it was only the two of them. This time Tegan and Sara, with band in tow, played the lovely Aladdin Theater in Southeast Portland. Their first album for Vapor Records entitled This Business Of Art was more about folk songs than rocking out, but on their latest album, If It Was You, they have found that the rock is now God. Opening with Time Running, Tegan and Sara effectively showed off their love for the rock, and the crowd was as excited as Michael Jackson at a N.A.M.B.L.A meeting. Playing a good portion of I.I.W.Y., they did show that even though the music has changed the Tegan and Sara live experience hasn’t changed too much. Tegan and Sara are known for their Smother Brothersesque stage banter and this night they didn’t disappoint. After a couple songs, Tegan started to tell a story about how their Mom was drunk at Christmas, and about the Christmas before when she found her Mom in the bathroom drunk and on the toilet giving therapy to their cat Taz who has self esteem issues. After the story, she asked if the crowd all wanted to come over for Christmas and the crowd gave an emphatic, “Yes!!” One of the great things about Tegan and Sara live is their interaction with the crowd and the fact that the between song banter is just as entertaining as the songs. Tegan and Sara also managed to fit in earlier songs like, Hype, and Come On. Before they played their so called last song, they told the crowd to pretend it was their last song, and started to tell the crowd goodbye and act as if it was the end of show while the crowd played along. After the song, they left the stage for what seemed like a half a minute and came back and finished the night with two songs. The very last song really was a punkier version of the Prince song When You Were Mine sung by Sara. After the show I was appalled. I was appalled at the fact that these girls have gone largely unnoticed in the U.S., but I guarantee that will change. These girls are to talented to be ignored, and soon they will own the U.S. See them in a small venue while you can because they won’t be playing them much longer. Now, before the show, I had the great fortune of meeting up with the girls and found them to be fantastic people. We chatted for damn near an hour, and talked about everything ranging from their songwriting, to the wonders of the Northwest. Read on, and you will find out what make Tegan and Sara tick and then when you’re done, go buy their albums and check out their website www.teganandsara.com. Enjoy! Patrick: So how’s the tour going so far? Sara: We’re only a week or so kind of into a short ten or thirteen day tour so it’s not really a huge tour, but it’s going well. It’s good, there’s lots of people at the shows. A lot less holes than there used to be. You know, you’d hit a good show and then hit a couple bad ones and then hit a good one and so far this year’s been great for us since we’ve done a lot of touring we feel we’ve made a lot of headway. P: When you say a good show versus a bad show how do you define which is which? S: I think that a good show is just when there’s…a good start is if there’s people there, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a good show, but if there’s people out there to see the show the first battle is won. There’s so many bands out there, and so many new cool things and so many things to do and so many things to see. So, if people are out then it makes me sort of feel like we’re making doing something, we’re making some sort of impact. So, that can be good enough, but there’s a thousand reasons that a show can go well or can go poorly I don’t even know where to begin, but for the most part, in the last few months I can’t complain. There’s so many people at the shows, and it feels better on stage to have a band, and I feel like we’re growing a little bit more into our own and trying not to think too much about thinking. It’s good it’s going well. Tegan: Whether there’s like one person or a thousand people in the audience it’s about vibe too. You can have a full room and not enjoy the show just based on the fact that whatever, something’s weird or the front row is weird or there’s somebody obnoxious and yelling or there’s just some sort of commotion. Definitely, the one good show to three bad shows or whatever…their starting to even out a bit just because it’s a band. Whether or not I like the audience sometimes like we know if they’re not into or they’re not getting a lot of energy. I can look around and feel there’s energy on stage. When it was me and Sara it was sometimes really hard if the audience was awkward or if they were really lackluster or didn’t have a lot of energy. We wouldn’t have a lot of energy sometimes ‘cause it was hard to bounce just off each other. So, it’s having the band. It feels like we can muster up some more rock energy if we need it because many people are adjusting to the band. I think its one thing to hear a record and hear it different than our music, but for the fans, especially in Canada, who’ve come out some many times and seen us play over the past four years …some of the tours we did they were amazing, but it was like 400 jaw dropped teenagers and half way through they start to get into it, but there was a lot of work to be done in that first 45 minutes trying to get them to be like, “I like this.” We were definitely selling the show for the first little while. I like that too. It made us work harder. Gone are the days of playing to two people in an audience or really bad opening slots. We’re getting to a level where it’s pretty consistent now that we have okay shows, but now there’s these new challenges like training an audience to get into the show and getting the energy you need back. Learning how to get it from them and stuff. It’s those new challenges on stage. P: Using the old trick like, “Portland Rocks!” or “We love being in Portland!” T: Yeah, Totally. Especially keeping an audience that’s high energy, high energy. It like a show in Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, it’s a great place. For some odd reasons, out of like the twenty shows that we did on our Canadian tour in November it was just…we walked on stage and they’re yelling and screaming so loud, I’ve said this so many times, but it felt like my hair was ruffling behind my head like it was so friggin' loud that it felt like there was 200 people there instead of 700. And they never stopped. Like after every show it was just as loud and screaming hysterically. You learn how to keep that audience going by like, after the third song I was like, “We just did nineteen shows in Canada. We should have just done twenty in Ottawa!” The guy who produced or last record Hawksley Workman, we haven’t seen him in years; we were kind of estranged. He came to our Toronto show and he’s been living in Paris and playing over in France and all those places. He did a big tour with a band that’s pretty big there, like only in France, but he opened for them and they were doing 10,000 seat arenas. He was like, “It was an amazing summer,” and “You know I was doing the kicks” and he’s very animated, Hawksley Workman. He’s doing kicks in the air. He’s like “I was like, ‘Alright Paris! This is the Next Song!’” and literally two days after they finished that tour he went out and did some solo gigs in London and he was like, “I was doing the high kicks, and I was like, ‘This was cool last night but its not cool now!’” and people were staring at him. So, sometimes it’s hard to go from audience to another. It’s hard to go from playing your own shows to touring and opening for somebody else and having to be somewhat reserved and polite, and then all of a sudden you’re back on a tour. There’s a balancing between…it’s not like putting together a world tour and there being thousands of people in every city. Some nights its 200 people, some nights it’s a thousand, and you really have to learn how to balance the differences and balance the type of people. Then there’s the language barrier, and an American thing. There’s lots of fun stuff. P: You guys aren’t French Canadians though; you’re just plain old Canadians. T: Just plain old Canadians, no cheese and gravy on us. P: So when you’re doing the tour and publicity and stuff is it nice to have your sister there? Or does it get annoying after while? S: I think we probably…any kind of the comfort we can enjoy from one another, I think, suddenly can become the frustrating thing. There’s sort of boundaries we can have with the band, or are tour manager or whoever’s around that we just don’t seem to have with one another. I don’t know. The road is a funny place. It’s a very solitary place even though you’re hanging out with people and doing your own thing. P: Tegan, in your bio Sara says you “write songs like a fish lays legs” how was it touring with Ryan Adams since he is such a prolific songwriter and it’s the same type of thing? S: One of my first conversations with Ryan…we had an initial conversation after he offered us the tour and that was great, but I thought he was just doing his rock star duty. You know, thanking us for doing the tour or whatever, but then he started calling our cell phone all the time. One night I was in the hotel room, Sara was out at the Halifax evening, he called talking my ear off for about an hour and then at one point he was talking about dating and what type of people…and I said, “I would never date a musician I would never date an artist” He was like, “Why?” I can get so self absorbed. Being asked questions constantly they’re always reeling through my mind. Like, it takes me weeks to get out of a place where, when I have nothing better do to, talk out loud to myself about myself. It’s an easy place when you are writing music and you’re just in your world. Musicians, I just think that …it’s a very self absorbed very me, me, me world and to be with another musician it would just be weird or competitive, or we’d be in a bubble. So, I said that I look for people who are outside of music and entertainment because they can humble me; they can cut me back down to where I belong. He started into this thing about how he gets up in the middle of the night to write and how no one understands it and he’s just got to write, and “Don’t you know? Don’t you ever feel like that?” I’m like, “Nope, my guitar goes into the case at six o’ clock. That’s the end of the work day” and he was horrified. He was like, “I don’t understand it!” I think I was very prolific in that Sara hardly wrote any songs. She would write 5 or 6 songs, and they would be amazing and we would play those songs. Whereas, I would write 20 and we’d have to go through them. Sara spent…I think was a lot more meticulous in her writing or I would assume. I wasn’t there with her. I would assume that’s why she was writing so little is that she was spending a lot of time focusing on the songs she was writing. Whereas with me, I don’t have the time for that it feels like. I feel like I have to get it out of me and it be done and I don’t spend a lot of time reworking things and that kind of thing. So, when we were doing the record, I would write a song and Sara would go through it and if she ripped enough out of it I would just quit and not do that song and write another one. Now that Sara has the computer…she practically has a whole twelve songs ready for the next record. I think a lot of it too was…I think that’s the number one reason we do this job because we love writing and playing music. And the recording process seems to be the most important. When we recorded in our high school at our school we had one of those ghetto blasters that you press record. We used to take these ten song tapes we used to sell to friends and stuff like that of us recording at home. So, I think that recording has always been pretty much the most important part for us. So, now that Sara has a computer at home, I know that in the last six months she’s written more songs than she’s written in two years, that I’ve heard, which is a big step. So, I think to be able to have the control and the ability and power to record ourselves has really changed the way we write and how much we write. So, I’d say we both write songs like fish lay eggs now. Not just me. P: Do you think its more freeing, Sara, having the computer and being able to just put it down? S: I don’t know what it is. Partly I think that having a recording system…I was just speaking with a friend who’s a musician who’s had trouble, she’s working on her next record, having trouble writing songs and I was really adamant about her getting her own recording system whatever it may be. Just because, I know for myself, I get more excited to sit down and record and write songs and come up with melodies and have fun and fool around than I ever did to just sit down and play guitar by myself. There’s something more challenging mathematically kind of about sitting down and recording. Playing, for me, is a performance thing and I only need a certain dose of that a day and there’s something about sitting down and playing music or playing your songs that’s very validating but only for that small piece of the day and the rest of the time I sort of needed an outlet or a tool so I find the computer benefits me that way. P: In another online thing one of you said Portland was one of your favorite shows to do with Ryan why was that? T: I think we played a lot of theaters. A lot of sit down, a lot of big theaters like 2000 people. Not necessarily always the most engaging thing. It was definitely the best opening slot we’ve had based on the fact people had to listen because they were seated and it wasn’t so big they could walk around and not listen. So, it was a great opener in that way. Plus, I though we had a lot of the same demographic too. The reason why Portland was cool was that it was small, only 900 people, and it was a nice room. I just think a little more rock and it was the end of the tour so there was a lot more energy. You know, Ryan came on during all the shows and he played like five songs a night with us, like he’d come on and jam, but on that specific show he only did three songs. Which I liked because I thought the audience got into it but even more so when he came out like it was more of a specialty thing. Some of the other shows after he came for like a third, fourth, fifth time people were just like, “Okay, Ryan’s back again.” So, I liked that show…it was the most consistent show, how we’ve done it and we were going home the next day. That was pretty exciting. I remember it as pretty good. I don’t remember it like I remember Chicago where I was exhausted and ready to go home. I remember it as like, “We were really excited and family and friends were there.” I liked it. I like this part of the country. You know Seattle, Portland…I was just saying I’d like to get back in March and like Eugene and Olympia and really start working these markets. They are so close to home, there’s such a deep, embedded music scene here, it’s well known. I mean I know every place in the world has music wherever it is, but music that related to when we were teenagers. We were listening to a lot of West Coast, Northwest coast bands like Babes In Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, L7, and Nirvana. We were into that type kind of music, into a lot of the grunge stuff. So, its nice being here, it feels like without even having been to a lot of those places that they just probably are into music there and it’s so close. P: How far is it from Vancouver? T: To here (Portland)? It’s about 5 and a half hours, and to Seattle it’s like two hours we’re practically a suburb. So, it would be wonderful to tour a little more often down here. P: The other twin band that’s had a lot of success is the Proclaimers. Do feel any pressure to write a song like that? S: I don’t think so. The only pressure I ever feel is that there is sort of a stigma attached to sibling bands. That there is a stigma attached to acoustic music. There’s all these things that we sort of encompass that I occasionally wonder would it have just been easier to start a band without a sibling and just do something more straight ahead and not having any of those things dragging you down a little bit. So, in all seriousness, I don’t worry about any kind of similarities between us and other twin bands. I hope that at some point that it becomes more than we’re siblings or that we’re…I think that it’s interesting to a degree but I don’t want it to be the only thing that’s interesting about what we do. I mean it would be nice to know that what we’re doing is truly interesting and not just because we’re twins doing it. T: I think the twin thing ends up being like the girl thing. Someone came up to me 5 seconds before we played the other night, from the local radio station, and was like, “So Tegan is it folk rock or is it girl rock?” I went, “I don’t know it’s just rock” and walked off and he was like, “Great Quote!” I think the twin thing comes right in there. Being labeled it doesn’t matter. We are girls and we are kind of folky, but also poppy and we’re kind of rocky, but also punky. We’re also girls and we’re twins and we’re young and we are those things, but sometimes being told them all the time you get irritated because you’re like, “I wish someone would see something else in us.” The other day I did an interview, with a girl from Portland, she was like, “You guys remind me of Catatonia. In that I haven’t really liked a girl band since I heard Catatonia.” I was so excited, and it doesn’t matter that I happened to like Catatonia a lot, and they were on Vapor Records. Sara doesn’t really like them all that much, but even just being compared to something else I bet if you asked Sara is she’d rather be compared to Catatonia or Alanis Morisette I’m sure you’d say Catatonia just because it’s so nice to be referred to as something different. Even though I like Alanis Morisette or you know when people reference Ani DiFranco, or Jewel, or even now Avril Lavigne or Michelle Branch, it’s not that I don’t like those bands it’s just that I’m tired of being referenced to those bands all the time because do we really sound like them? And that’s the question. Is that no one really backs it up sometimes when they compare us to bands. This girl backed up why she thought we sounded like catatonia, and I liked that. I was like, “That’s cool!” One of the first reviews we got for this record was actually from Idaho somewhere and said we were like a Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, something else and backed it up. I was like, “Yeah you know, we do have some of those elements in our music. That’s interesting.” That’s cool that they saw that instead of just seeing what they heard from the last record. So, yeah the twin, girl, rock all that stuff sometimes it just sucks being told what you are all the time. Because we’re still just coming out of our teenage…we’re young adults, we’re picking our direction and there’s something irritating about someone being like, “So you’re folk, and you’re girls, and your twins and you’re this.” You’re just like, “I’m not!! I’m this.” So, to be limited it ends up limiting maybe the potential of the band and I think with this band we keep trying to change. With this record we got louder and a little more punky and we were hoping to attract a more diverse demographic with this record. Not just girls, not just college students, but a lot of different people, and we are we’re starting to see that. I’m hoping that’s because our press isn’t so limiting this time around. It’s not just, “Twin, Teen Girls, From Calgary, Alberta Who Sound Like Ani DiFranco.” And we get those people that like that out. This time around it’s “Oh their kind of punky, and their this and their that and they played with this person” and we’re getting young kids out, and skater guys out, and we’re getting college girls and college students and we’re getting Moms and Dads. Just things like that, our demographic is broadening not only because of the music we’re writing, but also because a lot of writers are writing for the second or third time about us and their not just writing about those limited things. P: So the big jump between the first and second record was intentional then? T: It was very natural. John and Dave hadn’t even heard our first record so they produced our record only having heard the songs we had written for this latest record and only having talked to us and met us. I think the record reflects our personalities way better because they didn’t have all that background. They just had what they heard which was apparently what they put on the record and that’s why I think we relate to this record a lot more. It was a very natural thing, because they were brought in and just saw what we’re doing and what songs we’re playing in out demos and produced it that way. It was definitely not contrived. It wasn’t like, “Okay this record Sara let’s make it louder and let’s do that.” It was a natural process. We started to play electric guitar and being in bands when we were in high school and just got stripped down naturally and now it’s gotten built back up. That comes with confidence. Just playing on the road for a couple years, and boredom, and wanting to change things up a bit, but it was definitely a natural thing. P: So, as you were making the record what kind of music were you listening to? S: The same thing we always sort of listening to you know a lot of older stuff, a lot of rock. It was cool having John and Dave, like their influences. They’re both in their thirties so they had a lot of back catalog of eighties music, and just bands we had never heard of. They work with Matador and they’re friends with a lot of different bands and some Sub Pop artists and stuff like that. So they introduced us to a lot of stuff and some of the influences we would talk about. I know that John and I specifically spoke about bands II really liked and it was interesting he would be, “Oh you really like that band? Well, these are the bands that influenced that band.” So, there was a couple times I was discovering bands I even almost like better than I liked. It was just such a blatant rip off of what these people were doing. So, we’re just listening to a lot of stuff, but mostly rock stuff. Actually, Ryan Adams, when we were on tour with him, one night was horrified that I wasn’t very familiar with The Replacements and went out and bought me 50,000 Replacement CDs and Husker Du CDs and wanted to make sure we were well learned. Which, I sort of knew that scene but more like the Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. type stuff. I had always been into that. It was like luck of the draw. I mean when you’re 15 years old and you’re discovering different scenes or any of that kind of stuff you don’t necessarily discover everything. You just sort of discover pockets of it. So, it’s interesting to discover the other side of that like the Fugazi and all that kind of stuff. That was a little more hardcore than Dinosaur Jr. P: So has that affected your songwriting now? S: It’s hard to say how things affect your songwriting. I mean, it’s like music is music. I think you inherently have style. Certainly the better I get at guitar the more I can…I was thinking about it today after the in store. I was thinking about some of the songs we’ve written for our first record and it horrifies me that those songs are out there like that might write the script for the rest of my musical life. If I wanted to be in a hardcore band right now it’s like one day someone’s going to be like, “You’re in a hardcore band? What about ‘Clever Meals’? That light acoustic piano ballad that you wrote when you were 18 on your first record?” and you get this horrified feeling. I try to think of the style of music that you play like clothing sort of. Four years ago, I had long brown hair that I used to wear in braids with a big took, and I was like a skater… T: It was more than four years ago. S: Whatever in high school, I was a skater, raver basically and it I never thought I’d be wearing a children’s corduroy coat, and big white sneakers. You can change the style of your clothing just as much as you can change the style of your music I mean essentially your songwriting. T: People ask for Clever Meals a lot. S: Listen, I don’t care who likes it. It’s me that looks back on it. It just seems so amateur. It just seems so geeky. You just sort of want to be able to keep moving, progressing and not have people go, “But, You used to be like this.” And your like, “I used to be like that but also used to have like really bad acne and horrible hair.” That doesn’t mean I have to have horrible hair and acne for the rest of my life. You sort of grow out of things that you were once a part of and that doesn’t mean they were bad things. I had lots of friends and I was okay. It wasn’t like I was ostracized or something, but you don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to go back to writing that kind of music. I want to move forward and progress. Like a band or like music even when they change dramatically there is a songwriting style. I really like Built To Spill and I just recently picked up the singer’s acoustic kind of like solo project, and its completely different than Built To Spill yet there’s something similar about it just because it’s him writing songs. It doesn’t matter if he’s playing with and indie rock band or if he’s playing acoustically with a slide guitar it sounds the same to me. The songwriting sounds the same to me, but the music’s completely different. P: Speaking of Songwriting, I have to ask about a couple songs on the record (If It Was You). The two I really like are Underwater and Living Room. Underwater, it said in your bio, was born out of a failed attempt at a kids book. Is that true? S: Sort of, when I got home from touring this last record I wasn’t necessarily writing a kids book. I was just writing, writing, writing, and I have a friend who her and I have always made jokes about doing a kids book together so I was writing stuff for that. I sort of left that alone and then when I actually started writing some songs and I needed some lyrics, I was having trouble with lyrics. So, I just basically cut and pasted some of the stuff that I had been writing and put it as sort of the base of the lyrics for Underwater. So, it was born out of that. It’s kind of the strangest song to sing because it’s not really about anything. Usually I write about something. P: It’s funny because it kind of gels together. It’s great. The line about the love song, “verse chorus and such” I love that line. S: See all those pre choruses like the “verse chorus and such part” or the “twisted elbow crush” those I added after the fact. I felt like I needed something kind of quirky to go in there. It’s funny, I’ve had a lot of different people tell me the lyrics themselves were kind of lame it’s just the way I sing them. P: With Living Room, did you literally live that close to someone? T: Yeah, just imagine a piece of glass in front of me and a piece of glass in front of you. Sara, she’ll back me up. S: It seemed a lot closer, because it was windows looking into windows, but It wasn’t that close. T: It was pretty close. P: And they just left their windows open all the time. T: That’s the thing is that they kept their windows closed all the time. They had blinds. I lived there for six months and they only opened up them twice. The two times that they opened them up, one time was the day I moved put and the time before was two nights before I went home for Christmas. I went to bed and just couldn’t sleep. I was really excited. We had just done a few demos with John and Dave, Underwater, I Hear Voices, Not Tonight and something else. We did one other one too. Oh, Sirens which didn’t make it on the record. So, we did some demos with them just to send to the record company so they could hear…so they could okay John and Dave as our producers or whatever and I was laying in bed listening to it and I was really sick. I couldn’t sleep and like probably about 2:30 in the morning, I don’t like to take cold medication, but I finally decided I’m going to take some cold medication. I went out into the living room, and I was like, “something feels weird” and I was all groggy and I was like, “It’s light. It’s light in my room.” I looked over and their windows were wide open. There was this man standing there like the huge guy, big, fat guy, hairy, no shirt on and he was really scary looking and he’s staring into my apartment and it was dark and there was this frail little, young probably in her mid thirties woman balling hysterically and they’re both just standing there. I was like, “What the fuck?” I thought it was so weird and I kind of sulked to the bathroom and took my medication. On my way back they closed the blinds, and the next morning I woke up and we were catching a cab to go home to Calgary and I wrote the lyrics and was kind of just fiddling around with it and was frantic ‘cause I really liked it. I hated most of the song. The only part I liked was the chorus the “Spend all night”. I liked that part and it was a little bit different, it was a lot slower. I recorded it really quick and I brought it home and played it for Sara and my Mom and I sang it really out of tune, but it was in our heads. So, when we got home I changed it up a bit and I didn’t like it, couldn’t figure it out with the band, nobody could figure it out. All of us were really struggling with it. We went in to record the album, it was the last song we did bed tracks for, like the drums and bass and we recorded it kind of Fleetwood Mac-ie. Like the drums were really different than they are on the album, and really didn’t like. Brought a friend in to do the banjo part and he did a whole different banjo part. They kind of spliced it and moved it around. When the banjo was done, I liked it a lot better. Sara went in one night when I wasn’t there, and did the vocal part and as soon as the vocal part was there, I loved the song. I was like, “Okay, Now this makes sense to me again.” It kind of gave me back that initial energy I had when I did the demos. Sometimes, something about the demos is that you can hear all of the potential. That’s what I like about being able to record myself is I can hear the potential, but then when we took it to the band it kind of squashed all the potential. It straightened it out and I hated it. So, when the banjo and Sara’s vocals cam one, it was messy potentially. It was gonna’ be good again, but it just never cam around. It just never happened. They mixed all the songs, and there was only umm…what songs were left? There was this song that didn’t make it on the record called, “I Wanna Play Drums In Your Rock Band” It was a really cool song that Sara did but John and Dave went nuts on it and they played it for us and we really liked it. I think we were going to put it on as a secret song, but everybody said it just didn’t work well with the rest of the album. It wouldn’t have sat well with the rest of the record. It’s a b-side, it’ll come out someday. I was feeling frantic ‘cause I just didn’t think we were gonna putting that one on. We have to have eleven songs on our record, it’s in our contract, and there was only ten. So, I was like, “What happened with ‘Living Room’?” They both turned around and looked down at us, and they both started to giggle and they’re like, “Well, this one we went a little crazy on.” It’s completely different. Like the song is exactly the same, like me singing and the song is the same, but they put the drums in and sampled part of the drums that Rob had taken out. They played the bass on it. The keyboards, the slide guitars, the banjo, everything was sampled completely different except for Sara’s vocal and my vocal and the guitar. We just loved it. It brought back all the potential of that night. It’s probably one of the most quirky songs I’ve written. Play it live and it’s definitely a lot more rock, but when we listen to it it’s definitely really quirky. I don’t know there’s something about that moment. You can’t imagine it unit l your in that moment. Where I lived in that apartment and the first week I was so depressed that my windows were so close, and that there was no sunlight coming in, but there was something so close about being so close to that building and they always had their blinds shut. That song is like a joke. Almost making fun, like the line, “I spend all afternoon on top of you.” I got to the point where I would come out of the shower naked and walk through my apartment even though their blind were right there. So, the song has a really weird vibe. When I sing it it’s really funny ‘cause it’s one of the only songs I’ve ever written that had not very much to do with me. All it had to with me was that I thought it was really sad that she was crying. Like, it was such a weird odd moment. So, I tried to sort of act as if I knew her or something when I wrote it. So, it was one of my quirkier songs I suppose.