-Our next guests are twin sisters
and Grammy-nominated musicians, whose 10th studio album,
"Crybaby," will be available October 21st.
The first four episodes of their show, "High School,"
based on their "New York Times" best-selling memoir,
premieres on Amazon Freevee October 14th
with additional episodes airing Fridays.
Let's take a look.
-Next.
Name?
-Sara Quin. -Tegan Quin.
-Are you guys twins?
-No. -Yes.
-Hey. -What?!
-Look, I know that you're mad at me,
but we don't know anybody here.
Don't you think we should at least have each other?
-I don't want to share everything with you.
Just leave me alone.
♪♪
-Please welcome to the show Tegan and Sara, everybody!
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪
Welcome. I'm so happy to have you guys here.
-Alright, let me know if I'm blocking Sara.
-Okay. -Am I?
-Is that something you worry about?
That's so sweet.
-Well, no, 'cause I was going to say,
if you can see her, I'll move forward a little.
-Okay. So it was the reverse.
It was reverse sister cruelty. -Yeah.
-So, you guys are twins,
but this is not something that you leaned into.
You kind of shunned your twin identity.
-Well, we were saving it for this sort of --
the sunset part of our career,
once people stopped being interested in the music.
We were like, "What else can we milk?"
-Twins!
-Yeah, we were like, "Let's finally tell people
we're twins."
-And this is very -- And this is a show based on
this memoir you wrote together.
And let me first ask,
what is the process of writing a memoir together?
Obviously, you shared the high-school experience,
but you had different perspectives on it,
I would imagine.
-Yeah. I mean, we hadn't done anything like this before.
And when we sold the book, I think it was
the first part of the process was just terror
because we had to write a book.
And then, a couple months into it,
one of our editors was like,
"You need a timeline and some structure."
And we just decided we would just tell our story
in our own voices and then just have the chapters alternate.
And then there's a lot of embellishment
on both of our parts.
And so it's kind of cool when you read the book,
because there's stories that come from both our perspectives,
and they're very different.
So it's basically like going to dinner with us.
-And when you read -- when you read each other's chapters,
were there times that you thought to yourself,
"That didn't happen"?
-Yeah, I was like, "She's lying."
But I was like, "That makes for a better story,
so we should definitely do it."
-Yeah. That's very good. You embrace that.
-I actually -- I remember being in therapy and saying --
-Oh, God, here we go. -There's...
No, actually, I -- Well, I've always known Tegan's a liar,
but the part that shocked me was actually just how
truly different her story was
from what I thought it was going to be.
You know, we're both gay.
And we, I think, started to really understand
that part of our identity in high school.
And I was ready to kind of, like, talk about that,
like, to really explore that, like, suffering and that,
sort of fear that I had as an adolescent.
And I read Tegan's story, and she's just, like,
not in touch with that part of herself.
And so I was like -- -Well, no. I just didn't suffer.
-Yeah. -Okay.
-Yeah. That's fair too, yeah.
-Did you guys come out to each other?
-No. -No.
-Oh, interesting. -I'm gay.
[ Laughter ]
-I think we all know. -Yeah.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-We didn't -- That's yet another thing.
Not to be like, "Our book so is cool."
But I do think, you know, the twin experience
has not really been explored.
And I think -- Like, for other people.
Like, And I spent most of my adult life
having people come up and be like,
"Can you read each other's minds?
If I pinch Sara, can you feel it?"
And, like -- But the more common thing is just to assume
that we must be best friends and tell each other everything.
But it's actually really hard to have somebody
that looks like you, is going through
all the same things that you are.
Like, there's this -- Especially as adolescents,
we really wanted to be our own people.
And so I think when we were both exploring our sexuality,
it was, like, scary.
I was watching Sara go through it, and she was tormented.
And I think -- I felt like she was going to think
I was copying her.
And so it was like -- It was just a secret.
We were, like, running around pretending to be
different people, even to each other.
-That's really amazing. -Yeah.
-I do think that that is completely counterintuitive
to what people think about twins.
-Yeah. And you see it on the show,
I mean, which is kind of cool.
Like, we really lean into that.
-Another thing that's cool is you cast twins
who you already were following them on TikTok?
Is that right?
-No, we weren't following them, but we --
-The algorithm gave them to us. -Yes.
Like, if you -- Like -- -It was, like --
-They're like, "You guys want to check out some twins?"
-Yeah.
Because, like, "You've seen two hours of clean Tok today.
How about some twins?" And I was like...
-That is quite literally what happened.
We were talking a lot about twins
in front of our cell-- cellphones.
I was about to say, "Cellular phones."
And we had not yet begun the casting process,
but we were talking about twins a lot.
And Tegan sent me Railey, who actually plays Tegan
on the show -- she sent me her TikTok
and said, "I mean, these girls could play us on our show."
And from that moment forward, we really were, like,
advocating for them all the time.
They're not actors. They were not musicians.
They did have a lot of likes on TikTok, like millions of likes,
and so they felt famous.
-So the most important thing that people look for these days.
-People like them. Right. Yeah.
-Yeah, we -- You know what?
I think Tegan and I are --
We're good musicians and we can do what we do,
but, I mean, I think everyone agrees
it's our charm that really got us this far.
-Yeah.
-I mean, certainly, if they didn't know before tonight,
they know now, yeah.
-But we found Railey and then we started obsessing over them.
And when it came time to cast the show,
we went through the normal procedure of, like,
looking at a lot of really wonderful twins.
But we just kept coming back to Seazynn and Railey.
And they remind us of the way we were when we were younger.
And they're from Fresno.
They were working in -- -Like, a pizza place.
-Yeah, they were working in pizza.
-"In pizza." -And we were --
-If you can get your foot in the door in pizza...
-And they can always go back if they want to.
I mean, we did -- -We'll see how the show does.
-We'll see how the show does.
But we just -- You know, we watched them really bloom.
They took acting lessons.
We -- You know, they worked -- They became, you know, musical.
They can sing. They can play guitar.
And they're -- They're just incredible.
And we really either -- Like, I mean, I think the jury's out.
I think we've hopefully, you know, made their lives
exciting and different than they were before,
and hopefully they don't hate us
or we've ruined their lives.
I don't know yet. Like, the show's not out yet.
-It could take years to know. -We love them.
-Did your -- Were your parents supportive
when you decided to pursue music?
-They were definitely very excited by
the music we were creating.
We'd taken piano lessons our whole life.
-But we weren't very good. -No, we weren't.
So when we started to play guitar and sing,
I think they were more just, like,
intrigued and fascinated by what we were doing up there.
You know, we'd weave our vocals together.
We were natural harmonizers.
There was things, melodically, we were doing that, I think --
My parents, who were big music people and fans of music,
were like, "Oh, this is special."
And then we went through a punk-rock phase,
which kind of conjoined with our acid phase.
And I think they were like, "Make it stop.
Go to university."
And then we kind of came out of that,
and, you know, a lot of really great things happened to us.
And I think that, through that journey, they were like,
"Okay, this is the real deal."
-When was the first time they saw you perform live
with other people?
-Like, not their friends? -Yeah.
-Because my mom would do that.
She would, like, bring friends over and bring them upstairs
and be like, "Hey, play for these people."
And then she'd be like, "Are they good, like,
or are they just annoying?
I can't, like -- " You know...
-I think it was when we -- In grade 12,
we won a city-wide garage wars competition.
And that was the first time I remember our parents being
like, "These are -- A lot of these people in this room
are strangers, and they seemed to like you."
And they were really shocked and really excited.
And that definitely --
-But then they were just like,
"Well, now you need to treat it like a job.
You have to pay rent." -They wrecked it for us, yeah.
-Oh, immediately.
-Yeah, they turned it into an adult thing.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
They're like, "Congratulations on Garage Wars.
Here's your bill."
-Yeah, exactly.
And so, we were like, "No problem."
And 22 years later, we make a show where we depict them,
and we have control over how they're depicted.
So it's our payback. It was a long game.
-Yeah, play the long game. -Yeah, totally.
-You talk about the sort of dabbling in some drug uses
as younger people, and --
-Which we're not advocating for. -Not advocating.
I think you're very honest and clear right about it,
which is very nice.
But your mom -- she caught you a few times?
She found some stashes?
-Well, yeah.
-She did -- I mean, we thought we were brilliant
and we thought we were getting away with it most of the time.
But our mom went back to university
when we were teenagers and she worked evenings.
And so we were often left alone.
And one night, we had friends over, and we bought --
-Some would say "unsupervised." -Yeah, some would say.
But, like, you know, she was doing the best she could.
We love you, Mom.
And she -- Yeah, she came home in the middle of an evening
where we thought she wasn't going to be home.
And she went down to her office, where we'd been hanging out,
and she managed to find, like, a big -- I don't know how big.
This big, this big -- In the book,
we would say it was this big.
A huge bag of weed. And she busted us.
And we claimed it was a friend's.
Chris'. We said it was Chris'. -It was Chris.
-We were like, "It's Chris."
And she said, "Well, I'll give you guys an option.
We can smoke all the weed right now together
or we're going to flush it down the toilet."
And we were like, "No, Mom, it's Chris'.
We can't do that."
And she was like, "Well, you'll have to explain to it Chris.
You can smoke it with me or you can flush it down the toilet.
So, in the end, she flushed it down the toilet.
But then this is the masterful move of my mom.
She stayed there all night with us hanging out
as us and our friends all burned out.
Like, we were just like -- You know, like, put a movie on
and, like, had to act like we weren't absolutely just,
like, burnouts.
And so we were all like, you know...
-Well-played.
That's definitely a page to take out
when you're writing your parenting book.
Hey, you guys, thank you so much,
and thank you for doing a song for us.
This is really exciting, as well.
So we'll see you just after this commercial break.
You guys, that's Tegan and Sara.
"High School" premieres on Amazon Freevee October 14th.
We'll be right back with a performance from Tegan and Sara.