Tegan: This blows my mind, but Sara and I are the age my parents were when we started our final
year of high school.
But when I try to go back and think about what they were doing and all the things I
faulted them for and all of the missteps that they made, and then I apply it to right now
... me?
I fuck up all the time.
I'm a mess.
Everything's a disaster.
Imagine right now.
I'm like, "Oh my twins are here.
My 17 year olds, they're going to come in."
I mean, can you imagine?
We wrote this song in 1996.
It was one of the first songs we ever wrote in high school.
We had just found a guitar and we were experimenting with songwriting and we would very often write
a song and then quickly record it.
And so we actually have one of the early recordings of this song, and when we were writing our
memoir and sort of digging through our archives, we were able to unearth the demo and we thought
the song was amazing, and we decided to rework it for our new album.
For me, that was a great first line because it allowed us to capture that anxiety that
we all feel when we're just on the cusp of trying to say something about ourselves and
reveal something about ourselves.
We were lying to our parents about we were sneaking out and we were taking drugs.
We obviously both were struggling with our sexuality, and so there was a lot of secret
keeping during that time.
That remains hard in adulthood, but perhaps is hardest when you're an adolescent because
you just have this crazy crush of emotion and hormones and fear.
In a lot of the notes that I wrote in high school, I talk about love all the time and
not this what I think is presumed teenage girl love.
This idea that it's hearts and bubbly cursive and ... I hate when teenage girls are represented
that way in television and film, where they take their name and the boy they like's last
name.
Who does that?
I don't ... I didn't do that and I never did that.
I didn't know people who did that.
For me, that whole first verse is about whether it's your disconnect from yourself, from someone
you like, from your family.
I just really wanted to paint this picture of feeling isolated and misunderstood.
When I finally found this cassette tape with these 15 or so songs on it this was one of
the first songs that came on.
For weeks afterwards, I would sing it in the house and my girlfriend was like, "Please,
stop singing.
That is so irritating."
But it just was always in my head.
So, that is a direct pull from the demo.
What was keeping me up was, well literally, was LSD because it did.
It would keep me up for 12 to 15 hours after I took a hit.
But I think that what was keeping me up was the idea that even at 15 years old, people
were talking about their future in this context that bothered me.
I hated the idea that there was already this preordained process that I was going to have
to go through.
I was going to graduate, I was going to go to college, I was going to get married, I
was going to have children.
That was the dream.
That was the middle-class dream.
And I had a guilt about the fact that I didn't really want that.
I didn't believe in it and I didn't think it was for me.
Sara and I had kind of really become estranged, and our relationship was just really disconnected.
And part of it was Sara was having a really close relationship with someone we had sort
of been both close with, and I didn't understand this sort of ... I'd sort of been kind of
blocked out of the relationship.
We still all hung out, but at the sleepovers they would share a room and I would kind of
get relegated to the guest bedroom, if you will.
And I think there was a real ... I didn't understand, initially, that they were hooking
up.
Sara and I would fight all the time in front of this best friend, but my mom was constantly
like, "What is wrong with you guys?
What is up?"
And one night in particular, I just remember losing it.
And I ended up back in my bedroom with my mom trying to console me, just rivers of snot
coming out my face, eyes swelled shut.
You know, doing that like, "Huh-huh-huh," that gulping, hysterical cry.
And she was just like, "You know, you're going to be fine.
You're funny, you're cool.
Everybody loves you."
And I just couldn't have seen myself as more different than that.
I know that what made those conversations not completely connect or is like glue for
me when my mom would say "I would love you no matter what.
If you're into girls, that's fine.
You can tell me."
I didn't believe her.
And I'm not even saying that it was because I didn't believe my mom would love me, but
everything in my world told me the opposite.
It was illegal for gay people to do anything.
You couldn't get married, you couldn't adopt children, you didn't have the same rights
as straight people.
And not because I had made a choice.
Not because I didn't go to math class, not because I was taking LSD, but because of something
so deeply intrinsic and I was born with it.
I think everyone that gets to that place where you know your parents are lying to you to
make things easier, and that was the age where that split happens.
Where you're like, "Don't even lie to me.
I know it's going to be bad."
I know it's bad.
How can you be mad at the institution of marriage?
How can you be mad at the government when you're 15 years old?
So the easiest person to be mad at is the person who's lying to your face that day,
that moment, that second, the person that used to be able to make everything okay for
you that can't anymore.
That sort of is embodied in that, "I don't love me.
I don't, I don't love me."
How can I love me?
I think that there is a point in your life where you have to acknowledge that even if
you dislike every system in our society, that you are contributing by participating in the
system.
And if you don't like it then disrupt it.
And I think that there is something about owning that you are also a liar.
Parts of yourself are false, and parts of what you are projecting to the world is false.
And admitting that in the song feels really important.
We're all accountable to someone or something, starting with ourselves.
There's a lot of tension that I found in the original demo.
There's so much tension and there's not a release of that tension.
I think it actually sort of adds a nice element to the final chorus because then it sort of
... All that energy, all that built up angst or whatever is allowed to sort of dispel I
guess, a bit.
Listen, I love a instrumental chorus, but kids these days, they got to sing along.
Remember back in the eighties everyone got, it was a real payoff to air guitar?
Bringing it back.
Lost in translation was also a phrase that we really labored over because we were like,
"We never said that at 16 years old."
And there's one other place on the record where we use the word closure, like, "I wish
I had closure," and we're like, "No kid in the '90s would have said that."