“ I’m thrilled with how things have changed. “When I think back to that early part of our career, the dominant part of what comes back to me is just loneliness,” she says. It wasn’t until “social media blew up” that Tegan and Sara found a sense of community in other LGBT+ artists. Tegan and Sara as children in Calgary, Canada. “We get a lot of credit for being out, but I think it was a pretty lonely, tough era of our career, because we had to internalise who we were.” “People fetishise twins, as well as lesbians, so people steered clear of it, as it was still something that was seen as perverse. What’s really sad, Tegan says, is how much they both internalised this. “We were 16, 17 when we started talking to the media, and a lot of the journalists were men, so us being gay was something that was really awkward for them to bring up – because talking about sexuality felt like talking about sex.” “It just didn’t happen naturally,” she explains. “But then, for the first three or four years it rarely came up and we got a lot of flack from the LGBT+ community for not talking about being gay in the press.” “We felt so visibly gay that we just embraced it,” she says. Tegan tells PinkNews that right from the beginning, she and Sara never hid their sexuality, but that she remembers those early days as a “pretty lonely and tough” era.

Tegan (right) and Sara perform in the semi-final of Garage Warz, a music competition in Calgary, in 1998.

It wasn’t long afterwards that Tegan and Sara released their debut album, Under Feet Like Ours, and began their journey from bedroom grunge band to mainstream success. “There’s just a rawness that comes from being young and not self-conscious yet, not playing for the public yet we were playing for ourselves, and being really honest and raw.”Ībout half of the songs on Hey, I’m Just Like You are original melodies – “enduring and raw”, Tegan says – that the pair wrote in the 90, on electric guitar. Ahead of their time!” Tegan tells PinkNews over the phone. Now aged 39 (just – their birthday is September 19), pop’s most famous lesbian twins rediscovered the songs last year and, although they initially thought they’d nostalgically “listen, and then be done with it”, Tegan and Sara took the songs they wrote together more than two decades ago and turned them into their ninth album. Tegan and Sara’s new album, Hey, I’m Just Like You, is made up of songs that the twins wrote before they became famous, when they were teenagers growing up in Calgary, Canada.

Tegan and sarah interview