Twins peak

Q: You guys seem to be a really good match with Chris Walla. How did you come to work with him in the first place? Something seems to click. A: Yeah, totally. When I met him the first time, he seemed like a really nice guy. He was very relaxed and kinda funny and easygoing. And he didn't know a ton about us, which I liked because there are so many misconceptions and labels out there about our band. I was excited that the only thing he knew about us was 2004's So Jealous, and that he liked the record. Chris also doesn't think of music in a gendered way. A lot of the time, dudes are, like, "That's girl music," but Chris isn't like that. He looks at us as just another band, another indie-rock band that he really likes. It's not gender-specific for him.

Q: The stuff from Sainthood really is a lot more rock `n' roll than your earlier work. It must be fun to play live. A: It's totally fun to play. And most importantly, between pre-production and recording, we played all these songs nearly 100 times each. Chris was really hypersensitive to not doing a ton of overdubs. The drum and bass tracks were taken from the original takes and we weren't doing a lot of punching in on the tracks on the record. So playing it live really has been quite fun. It's a lot of work, though. I'm feeling quite exhausted after a week of touring because it's all very uptempo and very well paced.

Q: One of the things I like about Sainthood is that, hook for hook, it's probably the poppiest thing you two have ever done, yet the songs are really smart and unpredictable. The arrangements aren't straightforward at all. A: I don't even know if we've done it purposefully. We're pretty unconventional people. Every time I think, "Okay, maybe I'll straighten this out a little bit so it makes a little bit more sense," it just gets weirder. We try not to overthink music too much because we really enjoy performing live and we don't want that pleasure siphoned out by thinking too much ... We've learned, we've accepted over the last few years that, as much as we've evolved and become more mainstream, we're definitely different than anything that's out there. We definitely don't sound like anything on the radio.

Q: Did I read somewhere that you two experimented with collaborating on songs together for the first time while making the new record? A: Only one song was actually co-written by us, "Paperback Head." But one of the B-sides, we wrote together as well, and we wrote about another 10 songs together. Most of them were written really late in the writing process so we sort of already had our favourites and it was more of an exercise to see if we could do it. But I think we'll write together more in the future.

Q: Are you going to put those songs out somewhere in the future? A: I think so. It would need to be very clear that we weren't putting them out thinking: "This is amazing. This is our new record. It's sooo amazing." These songs, we wrote them in a week and never touched them again - they're very much just demos. They are our first true collaborations. And they don't sound like Tegan and Sara. It's really strange. Tegan and Sara really is Tegan, and Sara. Writing together, it was like we had a whole new band or something. We'll have to come up with a different name.

(Edit:Ruby)