Tegan,
Our music video for Yellow pays loving homage to Coldplay’s video for their song, Yellow. Coincidentally, Coldplay’s album Parachutes was released in 2000 the year we moved to Vancouver, a city that at the time didn’t feel big enough to hold us both. It was one of the first CDs I bought after moving into my apartment in the west end, and I listened to it on my Discman as I walked circles around Stanley Park in the winter rain.
Two years later, I moved to Montreal, an abrupt departure that seemed to signal to everyone but me that our band was in jeopardy. I knew that I was running away, putting distance between us, but I did it to preserve the band and to save us. Twenty two years later, we’re back in Vancouver, both of us calling it home.
We have been twin sisters for 42 years. Twenty seven of those have been spent in this band. How many people remain engaged in collaboration with one person throughout their life? Not many. To remain intact, a tremendous amount of sacrifice and compromise has been required of us both. The reward of that work is an almost otherworldly connection to someone I met before I was born. It is also maddening.
Yellow, like many of the songs on our new album Crybaby, was written after we began to take steps to heal the bruises we have both carried with us since adolescence and early adulthood. Wounds that never quite healed right, and flare up seasonally, sending us spiraling backward in time. Are we doomed to remain forever 15, breaking up and breaking apart? Who am I outside of this relationship with you? I always imagined that answer would come in the form of a solo album. But our recent pursuits into publishing, television, and philanthropy feel like a way to expand our world out, and not just up. That feels right to me.
I took a stab at annotating the lyrics to Yellow below. I struggle with revealing too many specifics, as I prefer the listener to thread in their own stories. We once despaired over the fact that journalists rarely asked us about our lyrics. But, as I’ve grown older, I prefer the privacy of interpretation.
Sara
Yellow