Tegan and Sara Have Made Crying Cool Again

In the supremely self-aware prologue to their “F*****g Up What Matters” video, Tegan and Sara Quin field pitches for music videos—a meta bit that makes fans of the twin Canadian indie-pop stars swoon.

What about something sleepover-related? Oh wait, they did that with “Closer.” Maybe one with dogs? Never mind, the cast of “100x” was almost entirely canine. Well, then how about a yearbook-themed video? Um, you obviously aren’t familiar with High School.

Eventually, Tegan and Sara settle on the cleverly obvious: a music video about how to make a music video. And while that approach might have felt gimmicky, the duo somehow manages to mock themselves in a way that’s witty, but never abandons the blazingly sincere power of their most iconic hits, like “Stop Desire” and “I Was a Fool.”

“F*****g Up What Matters” is just one of many indelible tracks on their new album, Crybaby, which emerged from the depths of the pandemic. Currently, they’re touring the album—and tonight, that journey brings them to Portland, where they’ll be performing in Pioneer Courthouse Square with Mae Martin and Deep Sea Diver (as part of the PDX Live concert series, presented by True West and The Square).

On the eve of the show, Sara Quin spoke to WW about the inspiration for the album—and how it helped her reclaim the idea of being a crybaby as something, possibly, cool.

WW: Can you tell me about the origins of Crybaby?

Sara Quin: I was taking stock of myself as I was trying to start a family. My wife and I were doing IVF and had many disappointments. We were trying again and again, and throughout that difficult experience, there was a lot of inward searching. Who am I? Can I even do this? Do I want to do this? Why do I feel like an adult, but when it comes to the idea of being a parent, I still feel like a child myself? Maybe that’s how we all feel.

You have an awareness of what your career is and how people perceive it. For instance, the “F*****g Up What Matters video” is so self-aware.

I think there’s a real before-and-after moment around the album Heartthrob. Before that, I really feel like we were cemented [in the idea] that we are an indie-rock alternative band, and being too self-aware is kind of obnoxious—and being unaware is also a no-no. You don’t want to be too cool, but you don’t want to be not cool.

I could feel completely differently about this week by, like, next week—this is a new thought based on your question—but when I look at the pre-Heartthrob time of Tegan and Sara, there was a bit of fantasy. We were a little more abstract in our ideas and our lyrics. There’s actually a dreamlike feeling to the whole album. A lot of the videos that we made were adjacent to nightmares—these scary, intense, anxiety-filled images, like Tegan in the therapist’s office.

I think Heartthrob made us more self-aware, and it made us want to take control over the narrative before anyone else had a chance to. We can lead the way and get ahead of jokes and critiques before anyone else does.

The title Crybaby comes from the song “Under My Control.” The lyrics are so fascinating, alternating between “I should start working on myself again” and “I should be careful the condition I’m in.” There’s a conversation between the desire to control feelings and wanting to let them loose.

A lot of times when I’m writing something, I don’t necessarily completely understand it. It’s just like, how do those words feel when I sing them? How do they feel when I hear them back? A lot of it is physiological. And then later, I have to think about, what does it mean? What am I trying to convey?

In a way, you reclaim the word crybaby as a positive thing.

Look, I think all musicians and performers want to believe that if you say something or you feel something, you can make it cool. But I don’t mean cool like leather-jacket-and-a-cigarette cool. There’s this implied thing of, we may be fucked up, but we know we’re fucked up…and we know how to make something beautiful and sing about it.

When I wrote that [crybaby] section of the song, I knew that my wife was pregnant. I was thinking about how when she and I first started dating, she had never dated a girl before. And within the first six months of dating, there was this one fight we had when I started crying and she was like, “I literally have never, ever dated anyone who has cried as much as you do for an entire relationship. Is this normal? Do girls just cry all the time?” And I was like, “What the fuck? I’m just emotional. I’m just sensitive. I’m just in touch with my feelings.”

But she had never experienced a romantic relationship with a person who cried all the time. I remember being like, I’m such a crybaby. So the song is a callback to the early days of my relationship when I did not feel cool. And maybe now I’m reclaiming it as a cool thing, but I still feel like a total dweeb when I start crying.

GO: Tegan and Sara play Pioneer Courthouse Square, pdx-live.com. 6:30 pm Wednesday, Aug. 16. $51.