![]() So I think our songwriting on that album is really elevated. We were very aligned with our vision for that album and had a long time to write it, and we spent a year of our lives demoing and building the songs at home in our studios before we set foot into the real studio. I think The Con is one of our most complete works, from start to finish. I chose "Call It Off" from our fifth album, The Con, but honestly I could have chosen "The Con," "Nineteen," "Back in Your Head" or "Dark Come Soon" from the same album. I think it also shows off a quintessential element of "Tegan and Sara" with the super tight harmonies and crisscrossing vocals, which people seem to love. I suppose it just struck a nerve with a lot of people. I think the song is one of our best, though sometimes, I don't know if I know why. Last year it was on, like, 800 Grey's Anatomy playlists or something wild. To this day it is our top-streamed song every year on Spotify. When the show exploded in popularity, it became a huge song for us, and it also increased our audience size overnight. Placements in shows were not at all considered a cool thing to do if you were indie rock, which we were, but we said yes. When the album came out, we were on tour and our management called to see if we were supportive of a TV show called Grey's Anatomy using it. She assured me it was good, and we decided to cut it for our album So Jealous. I think I meant that I worried it was commercial-sounding. I was worried it sounded like Céline Dion, I told her later on the phone. ![]() ![]() When I wrote and recorded this song, I burned it to CD and sent it via Canada Post to Sara in Montreal. I knew then we had found our "next sound." I was struck by how different it was from what we'd done previously, but also by how original it sounded. We were touring in support of our album If It Was You and were fighting constantly, but then Sara recorded the demo and brought it out on tour on a CD to Europe and played it for me in a hotel room. But it wasn't! It inspired our next era of T&S, in fact. I was sure it was the end of Tegan and Sara. The song itself was the first Sara wrote after moving to Montreal from Vancouver in 2002. But I think the success of that song and album convinced her we were on the right path. Sara used to threaten to go back to university regularly. After nearly seven years of touring, we had finally "made it" - at least in some people's eyes. We got offered a huge US tour opening for the Killers, Rolling Stone listed So Jealous as one of their Top 50 albums of the year and the White Stripes covered "Walking with a Ghost." Overnight we were legit. All of a sudden, we had sold-out shows, we were selling thousands of albums a week, our Myspace exploded. When "Walking with a Ghost" started getting played on alternative radio in the US, we saw our band change before our eyes. ![]() Her choices include the hit that pulled Tegan and Sara back from the brink of a breakup, the TV show that still drives streams nearly two decades later, and the track that has its imprint all over their new album. "Even if they aren't our favourites - they are in a way - the people determined the 'best' songs we have by celebrating and supporting them, and giving us this wonderful career we've been so lucky to have," Tegan explains. In picking these songs, Tegan didn't choose her favourites, but rather the duo's "best" - which mostly translates to their most popular songs, as those are the ones that have reached the most people. Published Tegan and Sara have spent much of the last few years buried in the past: they released the teenage memoir High School in a 2019, recorded some of their oldest songs for the album Hey, I'm Just Like You that same year, and recent spun off their book into an Amazon TV show and the prequel graphic novel Junior High.Īs the Quin sisters return their focus to the present for the new album Crybaby (out October 21 via Mom + Pop Music), we asked them to take one more look at the past in order to rank their five best songs for Exclaim!'s High 5 column.
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