“We are like the Gallagher brothers, but in the Canadian sense,” Tegan Quin told The Age in 2003. Along with her identical twin sister, Sara, she had just finished promoting their album from the previous year, If It Was You, and in interviews, the pair joked that it sent them into therapy. That record, whose cover literally featured the pair yelling in perpendicular directions, rumbled with a palpable if unfocused angst, its strongest ideas buckling under the unbearable weight of being 19 years old in the public eye. By the end of that tour, perhaps to prevent an Oasis-sized meltdown, the two had moved to opposite sides of the country, Sara in Montreal and Tegan in Vancouver. Once tourmates and roommates, they began to repair their fractured relationship as penpals, sending demo CDs through the Canadian postal service.
The media didn’t know what to do with Tegan and Sara, gay twins who wrote songs that could be about sibling rivalry or sapphic anguish depending on how the light hit. In a feature in Out that spelled the sisters’ last names wrong, Tegan bemoaned their fetishization: “When we did photoshoots in Europe, there was a lot of, ‘Now touch your sister, put your hand around her… Get on the bed and lie down next to her.'” They wouldn’t make Radiohead do that, Tegan figured, so why them? Still, the profile’s author managed to work in that they were “twins—cute, sexy, quirky, rockin’, lesbian identical twins.” After all, this was a post-t.A.T.u. landscape: Lesbians were IN, as long as they were down to dance around in a wet T-shirt and writhe around in a Russian prison cell as they screamed about “All the things she said/ Running through my head.” Except t.A.T.u. were formed by a male record executive, and one half of the pair later said she’d disown her own son if he came out as gay. Tegan and Sara were actual-factual, labret-piercing, Chelsea-haircut lesbians, and they didn’t want to perform their sexuality for the male gaze.
Maybe that’s why their fourth album So Jealous, which turns 20 this weekend, featured a pile of felt hearts on the cover where their faces used to be. Maybe that’s why Tegan and Sara sing almost entirely in harmony throughout its fourteen songs, a doubling effect they’d carry through to all of their biggest hits moving forward. Maybe that’s why they recruited Weezer’s Matt Sharp to add keys beneath their howls. Maybe it was all armor for their relationship shrapnel, insulation to shield them from themselves. Or maybe, after years spent on the road opening for their label boss Neil Young, they were finally ready to let their sound transcend their image. Then again, we might do well to listen to the Quin twins when they tell us, on the album’s opening song, “I wouldn’t like me if I met me.” Maybe they weren’t donning armor so much as taking shelter, going into hiding to avoid facing their most vulnerable album to date.
In a way, these songs could only be written in isolation. How else could you possibly muster, “Look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t find me attractive/ Look me in the heart and tell me you won’t go,” off of the heart-wrenching “Where Does The Good Go?” These were confessionals, sealed in envelopes and entrusted to the Canada Post. There was something revelatory in their honesty: Their lovers cried “like a baby” on “I Know, I Know, I Know,” but as the twins sigh the song’s titular phrase, they’re admitting their own complicity: “What else are we here for?”
At just 24 years old, Tegan and Sara wrote with a knowing resignation, as if they’d lived a thousand parallel lives and found themselves in the same troubled dynamics every time. So Jealous was classified as emo (derogatory) at the time of its release, a way to quickly write off their descriptions of depression on “Wake Up Exhausted” and “I Can’t Take It.” But where emo acts of that era screamed outward — at their parents, their one-horse towns — Tegan and Sara swallowed their pain, painted it in the muted colors of everyday interactions. Take one dialogue they relay on “Wake Up Exhausted”: “Are you all right?” “I can stand up straight.” Or, on “You Wouldn’t Like Me,” the admission that they “can’t stop talking/ For fear of listening to unwelcome sound.” They’re restless but no longer quite young, old enough to know their own flaws but not too old to wear them like a security blanket. So Jealous is the sound of transition, of feeling ready to grow up but not really knowing how: “What I wanted most was to get myself figured out,” they sing on “Fix You Up.”
When I first heard So Jealous, I was ready to grow up, but not really sure how. I was 11 years old (so, doing the math, two years after the album’s release), and I woke up exhausted every day, loaded onto the bus with my iPod mini, and blasted Tegan and Sara as I prepared for another day sitting alone in the lunch cafeteria. I found So Jealous from the blogging platform LiveJournal, as part of a “fanmix” that someone put together to accompany some multi-chapter Panic! At the Disco fanfiction. I was straight, at least as far as I knew, but I did spend most of my free time reading homoerotic “slash” fiction about band members who were also straight, as far as they knew. Upon setting out to write this retrospective, I tried to find the exact mix, but I was paralyzed by shame as I logged into my long-dead account and saw my old comments about my “One True Pairing” (Ryan Ross and Pete Wentz, don’t ask) and how I’d never forgive myself for not seeing the original Panic! At the Disco lineup live. I am sure, though, that the song was “I Know, I Know, I Know” and that the guitars made me feel like I was covered in bubble wrap, even if the worst part of my day was being called a lesbian because I made the unforgivable mistake of wearing a periwinkle polo to gym class. So Jealous made me feel like my problems could be small and huge at the same time, that just getting out of bed was a feat worthy of a song.
Twenty years later, So Jealous sounds like the shape of Tegan and Sara to come: Their next album, 2007’s The Con, would mark a definitive shift in their sound, towards a more electronic shade of pop-rock that would culminate in their music being featured in the damn Lego Movie. You can hear the direction where their sound will go in its synth-heavy title track, which floats out to sea atop Sharpe’s undulating Moog, but there’s still a spit-shined, ramshackle quality present that fades from view as they brighten their sound. On So Jealous, Tegan and Sara reimagined what lesbian love looked like, and found that it was just as boringly aggravating as anything happening in the straight world.
