Sara,
The last time you and I were traveling together for work was summer, three years ago. We were promoting our album Hey, I’m Just Like You and our memoir High School. We flew to New York and Toronto and Los Angeles for press and signings and promo related to the projects before they were released. I felt excited to talk about the book and the album made up of songs we wrote in high school; to be sharing our origin story in a new type of media felt novel and exciting. New people wanted to talk to us, and outlets that never covered us all of a sudden were interested in us.
We talked to Terry Gross at Fresh Air, we got to play on Colbert, and he invited us to sit on the couch and be interviewed; only the second time in 20 years that has happened to us on late night. We made plans to tour across North America after the book and album dropped, just us on stage, playing old and new songs, stripped down. We would read from our book, show videos of us in high school, and tell stories about that time. We invested a lot of time and money into a Broadway director to help us put it together. We had a musical director and weeks of rehearsals. We wanted to do something fresh and different. The tour was successful; everyone seemed to love it. Dad came backstage in Calgary and said it was his all-time favourite show of ours. You wanted to keep the tour going and do more dates in 2020; our management at the time explored filming it for a special to come out on TV.
But I expressed an interest to just be done with the show. The most powerful part of it for me was playing on stage just me and you. We hadn’t done that since 2003. But the show itself felt heavy and lonely. I missed having a band and the camaraderie of being on stage with other people. I felt like we’d been thinking about high school and living in that world for so long — nearly two years — and I was desperate to shake the past and look toward the future. When the tour wrapped up in the UK, we put it to rest and went home to celebrate the passing of 2019 and the start of 2020 at home.
We booked a tour in January of 2020, put together a band, imagined a lively show and started to prepare. Then Covid happened. When our management called to say we should delay putting tickets on sale in March of 2020, I was walking at Crab Park near my apartment. You were at your house in North Vancouver. I interrupted and said, I don’t think the tour is ever going to happen. Let’s not delay, let’s just cancel it. You agreed. I think we both knew that no one was going to be touring anytime soon.
The next two years passed with no Tegan and Sara shows. It has felt strange, our absence from the stage, from an audience, from music and the performances that have been the concrete below our feet this past two decades. But we both expressed relief, to be at home, to be off the treadmill of releases and constant touring. You talked a lot these past few years about how you hadn’t even known how exhausted your body was from the last twenty years. I think I missed touring but also felt relieved to have no pressure to do it. Until now.
These past two weeks we went to LA, NYC and Toronto, just like we did three summers ago. Rehearsals in LA were so fun; it all came back so easily.
We did a photoshoot with Clea and Seazynn and Railey for the show and I loved the photos, loved being back at work. Then we flew to New York and were on Seth Meyers last week, and I felt so alive. So comfortable. So like me. For twenty-five years we’ve been writing songs and performing together. Being in a band is all I really know. The guitar feels so familiar to me, so comfortable hanging on my body, like the arms of someone I love wrapped around me. To prepare for our first performance I rehearsed for weeks to get my fingertips calloused and strong again. I had forgotten how good it feels to memorize and go off book and play for hours at a time. Slipping the guitar over my head the first day of rehearsals in LA I felt ready before we even played a note. The band sounded good; we finished every day early.
I slept soundly the night before Seth Meyers. Maybe the first good night's sleep before TV I’ve ever had. Watching back the performance — something I never do — the microphone tightly gripped in your hand looked as familiar to you as the guitar did on me. I watched our latest performance because I felt so confident and joyful performing and I wanted to see if you could see it on the screen. I think you can.
Playing on TV is often traumatizing. As you know. For so many years we had little to no control of the mix and I remember years ago watching our performance of Walking with A Ghost on Conan and crying later because it didn’t sound right. I stopped watching our performances because I became too self-conscious. But it didn’t matter, I still approached every late-night appearance with a knot of trepidation in my guts. I’m always so afraid we’ll fuck it up. That we’ll have to stop and start again. Can you even do that I wonder? Or the mix will sound bad, or we’ll look bad, or everyone will hate the song we did. The extreme anxiety and fear I felt before playing Closer on Ellen erased my memory of having been there. Which I guess is helpful. Even when it’s your song we’re playing on TV I’m nervous. On stage we’re extensions of each other, your mistakes are mine, my fucks up yours. Which was why I imagined playing Yellow on Seth Meyers would go the same as it always does. That it would be forgettable. Gone from me as soon as we finished.
Recently though, Sofia, who’s afraid of flying as you know, was told by her therapist not to take anything to fly. No pills, no drinks. He suggested by erasing her memory of flying, she’s erasing any possible good memories just as much as the negative ones that populate and overtake her on the plane. And it worked. Her last few flights were better, easier. Now she has positive associations of flying to conjure next time she boards the plane. I thought about that a lot as we got ready for this latest performance on Seth Meyers. Could I stay in my body? Live the moment and enjoy it? Could I remember it after and associate it with good feelings? Could I watch us on TV? The answer is yes. I was able to do all those things. I must have said a dozen times as we performed: this is fun! I like this! We sound good, Sara looks cool! Seems ridiculous, but I think it worked. I feel no trauma or stress about the performance, in fact, there’s a rumor that we’ll get more TV shortly, and I’m actually really excited about it.
After Seth Meyers, you and I shuttled between interviews in New York and I cried in the last interview retelling the story of how happy I felt being in a band, holding my guitar, and watching you strut around the stage singing Yellow the night before. Why? The raw joy of having enjoyed myself reminded me of how lucky I am, how truly fucking lucky I am to play music and be in a band. It was so raw, so close to my throat and my heart, I couldn’t stop myself from crying with joy as I recounted it. I needed that reminder. I think I’d lost the joy along the way.
Of course, you pointed that out years earlier, when we were at the record company pitching Hey, I’m Just Like You in early 2019. You told the staff assembled to hear about our new album that listening to our demos from high school and watching the VHS recordings of us performing our first concerts to friends in the 90s shifted something in you. You were stuck by how joyful we were then. So much of our early career was about anxiety, disappointment, sexism, misogyny, loneliness, and rejection, and you'd forgotten, that first, before all that, there was joy. You wanted that again, you told them, and me, and everyone else who would listen the next year. I wanted it too.
But it never came on that month-long trek across North America in support of the book and album we made before Covid struck. I did find myself feeling happy on-stage playing music with just you, but I didn’t experience joy. Now three years later I have. That joy I had as a young person that was stripped away has returned. On stage on Seth Meyers. Just being in a band. Just doing what we love to do. I hope I don’t lose it before we leave on tour. But I guess if I do, I can always search for it again. It’s always there, somewhere inside of me. We leave in less than a month for our first shows in three years, and we need to, it’s time. I’m still worried about what will happen out there, because a lot has changed. But after last week I know we can do it, and it might even be fun.
Tegan
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