Other artists tweaked the original tracks slightly, retrofitting Tegan and Sara’s aesthetic into their own. “But I just brainstormed with a producer friend of mine and I thought, ‘Well, since I’m not a singer, maybe the best thing for me to do was maybe go gothy with it, be more spoken than sung.” “I was like, ‘How in the heck am I gonna cover one of ?'” Blanco recalls via Skype from Norway. Let’s put your parts down and then have the band play to your feel.'”Īnother one of the album’s striking reinventions comes courtesy of Blanco, who transformed the off-kilter pop of “Knife Going In” into a sludgy, bass-heavy stomp that places his pitch-shifted vocals high up in the mix.
Even little tiny details like Chris saying, ‘Let’s sequence the album before we start making it, and let’s work in sequence,’ or, ‘Fuck drums and bass, let’s do it how you guys do it at home in your own studios.
#TEGAN AND SARAH THE CON FULL#
“Working with Chris in his basement and his own studio was like, ‘Oh, my God, we could give ourselves the luxury of working five or six days a week, for months on end.’ It was full immersion, and there was no pressure that we were taking up too much time, or spending too much money. “Back then, especially, where we were making records on a shoestring budget, we couldn’t go into the studio and fuck around. This is what we want to go into the studio and make,'” Sara recalls.
we said, ‘When we’re at home and we’re fooling around and demoing – this is the spirit we want in a record. Shamir’s spontaneous approach to the cover also echoes some of the homegrown studio techniques Tegan and Sara used on the original Con. “I loved that he was like, ‘Yeah,’ then did it in the next two days,” says Sara with a laugh. I added the harmonies, and the drums, and the bass, but it’s all built around that one take, which felt so perfect and so real to me.” “When I found out they wanted me to do, I just got super excited and just started singing to myself, and I set up a one-mic situation, and just played it through – one mic, one take, one guitar. Shamir’s version of “Like O, Like H” is one of The Con X‘s most jarringly intimate moments. “I wanted to keep it very raw, and very lo-fi,” he says. I’m so, so honored to have been asked to do it, because I’ve been covering that song to myself for years.” “It’s a really great coming of age song – I’m always the person who likes to learn from the situations that happen to me in life, and I feel like I’ve learned so much this year, and so much has happened to me this year. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter first heard Tegan and Sara when he was in middle school, and he named his personal Tumblr after the track. “‘Like O, Like H’ has always been my favorite song,” says Shamir via phone from Philadelphia. “I was like, ‘We cannot ask anyone to do ‘Like O, Like H,’ because Shamir had the ‘Like O, Like H’ tattoo on his body,” Sara says.
#TEGAN AND SARAH THE CON HOW TO#
We were talking about how to raise extra funds for the foundation, and we were like, ‘Well, maybe we just have other artists cover the songs and package it that way.'” “It started to evolve from ‘Maybe we’ll do four shows’ or ‘Maybe we’ll do a residency in New York and a residency in L.A.’ into a full North America thing. “We knew we were going to do the tour,” says Sara Quin via phone from Los Angeles, where she is prepping for the monthlong jaunt. All proceeds from the release will go to the Tegan and Sara Foundation, which raises funds to help LGBTQ girls and women. The pair also decided to reach out to the “diverse ecosystem” of musicians around them and put together The Con X: Covers, a new compilation that gives over each of the album’s songs to a different artist (including Ryan Adams, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, synth-pop outfit Chvrches, and MC and performance artist Mykki Blanco) for reinvention, sometimes to dramatic effect.
Starting this week, Tegan and Sara will take The Con on the road for a full-album tour. The album represented an artistic breakthrough for the pair, who had pushed into the mainstream with the jangly 2005 hit “Walking With a Ghost.” A decade ago, Tegan and Sara released The Con, a vibrant, heavily emotional album that showcased the Quin sisters’ knack for pairing left-field hooks with spiky harmonies and crisp songwriting.
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