![]() ![]() “We were so young for both those records … that they feel more like demos, really,” Tegan reminisced when I talked to the pair back in 2016. Both albums throw a lot of sounds at the wall, many of them grounded by scratchy acoustic guitars - hence the folk designation - and not all of them work. Tegan And Sara have spoken fondly if reservedly about their first two albums, 2000’s Under Feet Like Ours and 2001’s This Business Of Art. Their third full-length album - which came out 20 years ago this Saturday - is the first essential Tegan And Sara album, and it arrived as the duo started to experience the tempestuousness of early adulthood. That’s the spirit in which If It Was You was made. So I started thinking, ‘We’ve got to get away from these words.'” ![]() To me, songwriter meant, ‘You know, music for people like them,’ which is lesbians and women. It didn’t mean the same thing when people called Conor Oberst a songwriter. ![]() It didn’t mean the same thing when people called Neil Young a songwriter. “The thing I remember actively recognizing, pretty much as soon as we started playing, was that all of these words that really bothered us, that people were using to describe us, to me felt very coded,” Sara recounted in a 2014 interview. By the time If It Was You hit shelves in 2002, Tegan And Sara had already been lumped in with the era’s folky, singer-songwriter zeitgeist - spoken about as the next evolution of artists like Ani DiFranco and Melissa Etheridge - and they were determined to break away from the connotations those associations implied. An outsized portion of that attention came about because of their young age and, certainly, because of the novelty of them being twin sisters who both happened to be gay. The Quins started out making music in their bedrooms - an origin story recounted in their memoir High School, soon to be a television series - but they were quickly thrust into the spotlight. Tegan and Sara Quin were only 21 when If It Was You was released, and they were already used to change. ![]()
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