【T&S】Song Meanings

接下来是The Con 专辑的
一层楼一首歌。

Sara on “I Was Married”

The personal experience was that my girlfriend and I are common law, but she’s an
American and we were doing a permanent residency application for her to stay in Canada.
As part of the application process you have to go in and basically declare your common
law status before notary. So we got up really early and went to this notary in Old Montreal.
I didn’t want to get married and wasn’t getting married but it felt so formal, like a wedding.
I was thinking about how funny it is that my life seems so simple and natural, what
everyone does in life. You fall in love with someone, you make sacrifices and you do
things so you can stay together. Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me,
doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one yet it’s terrifying to
people and they think you’re a monster.

Tegan on “Are You Ten Years Ago”

The song is very much this bipolar conversation with myself about being taken.
‘Taken’ was the word my roommate and I used to explain when you were in a relationship
but not… I feel very much like I’m a high-anxiety, high-stress, high-worry kind of person,
and I’ve really been battling that for the last few years. And I see that circle imagery -
that idea of walking in circles - as how my songs process inside of me. And I don’t find
that music helps me actually get them out of me or stop doing the circle, so I just start
singing about it…

Tegan on “Hop A Plane”

It was the last song that I wrote, that I submitted for this record and actually, initially,
no one really liked it all that much but I think it grew on all of us. And for me, I really like
this song, cause it was the end of this like sort of emotional journey I had gone on.
It was like, basically I had fallen in love with someone and was trying to woo them.
And it finally came down to the fact that like.. “Just tell me if you want me.
And if you don’t, then get away from me.”
Interviewer: Yeah, what are the lyrics in the chorus?
Tegan: All I need to know is that you’re not mine.
Interviewer: Yeah what’s that…
Tegan: Well we’d been having a very like passive-agressive sort of you know like…
I was having an emotional relationship but we never really talked about how we
felt about each other, we’d talk like hours and hours and hours everyday and like…
Sara: They didn’t hit that shit.
Tegan: Yeah I don’t think you can say “shit” on CBC radio, can you?
Sara: Can’t you bleep it out or whatever.
Interviewer: I think you can now.
Tegan: Yeah? Yeah basically we never hooked up. And we were basically dating
and we talked hours and hours everyday and then I finally was like
“What is going on between us?” you know. And I had written like all these pining,
“come and get me”, “save me from myself”, “love me, why don’t you love me”
songs and finally I just like sent this song [Hop A Plane] to her and was like
“what the fuck?”
Interviewer: You sent the song to this person?
Tegan: Yeah I sent all the songs to the person. I mean I was making it very clear that
I was attempting to woo her through music because I had a hard time talking about
my feelings in general conversation. So I would send each song as I went along and
you know we had a rough patch, I sent “Call It Off” and you know like each song
represented a chapter in the journey that we were taking together. And then “
Hop A Plane” was the last song and it was sort of my way of saying like “if this isn’t
happening, you just need to let me know”. Which, that did not happen.
Interviewer: And so how did it end?
Tegan: I mean it’s over, I mean… never happened.
Sara: They didn’t hit that shit.
Tegan: I didn’t…
Sara: Say it, it’s okay, it’s part of the therapy.
Tegan: No it really wasn’t about “hitting that shit” I really wanted to like marry
the person. I was in a very desperate state.
Sara: You wanted to hit that shit and get married.
Tegan: Yeah.
Interviewer: Well it’s created art.
Tegan: I got rejected. I had never been rejected before. This is my rejection record.
Interviewer: Ok well it’s a great song.
Tegan: Thank you!

Tegan on Sara’s “Burn You Life Down”

I remember when she sent me “Burn Your Life Down” she said it’d been influenced by
my break-up, and also by our grandmother’s passing. She and my grandpa retired really
young and they used to drive all over the States. Sara had been really affected by
something he had said: that he didn’t want to go on any trips because when
he looked to his right, my grandma wasn’t there. He just wanted to cry and go home.
The record would’ve gotten redundant if it’d just been full of our own broken hearts.
“I drive around the block and I’m not looking to my right… keep on fighting to remember
that nothing is lost in the end.”

Sara on “Like O, Like H”

I was a happy kid and there isn’t a sad, sad story to tell. But our parents got divorced
when we were five, and I think I had a lot of anxiety when I was kid. I worried that
I was sick a lot… So, the first part of the song definitely is about me being a bit of
a troubled kid, worried and anxious about things. But a lot of that was inside,
like how I imagined myself when I was a little kid, ‘cause I know that a lot of people
didn’t see me like that. And then, as a teenager I was a brat, for sure. We grew up
in a tough neighborhood, and we sort of took on a lot of that attitude that comes with
being around a lot of tough kids. I don’t think we were bad, but definitely in junior high
and highschool… The second part of the song is about that time in my life.

Tegan on “You Wouldn’t Like Me”

That was the first song I wrote for the record and I wrote it a year before we started
recording [this album.] Originally we did it with this whole rock band a few times through,
and then we kinda took a different approach to it and started it acoustically and then
built into the full rock part. I’m really glad we ended up doing it that way and
I’m glad we used it to start the record. I think it’s actually a good hybrid of [what we do];
we still write the songs acoustically but having the addition of this whole band helps
accentuate the melodies and the rhythm.

Tegan on “Take Me Anywhere”

That’s kind of a funny song because it almost didn’t make it onto the record.
We demoed all of the songs for the record prior to getting together with the band,
and in some cases I got even so creative as to get a snare drum and an octave pedal
and recorded my own drums and bass because I really wanted to hear what the song
was gonna end up sounding like. I’m kinda obsessive compulsive that way.
So when we got to the preproduction stage of the record when we got together with
the band, it was really tough because in some cases we had given such a strong
imprint of the song that it was tough to go away from it because everyone was like,
“Oh, the demo sounds so great,” and, “Don’t change a thing.” But as we played
the song as I sort of played it on the demos, the enthusiasm and the power of the song
kinda dissipated and we all kinda grew very disinterested in playing it. And then a friend
of mine actually flew in from Calgary and I had given her some of the demos and
she loved that song. She was really disappointed we weren’t playing it and so one day
we all brainstormed and really tore apart the song and started working on it.
We call the drumbeat on “Take Me Anywhere” “poo-poo ca-ca”.
If you listen sorta like between the snare and the kick when he’s hitting it,
it sounds like “poopoocaca-poopoocaca-poopoocaca”. And we thought that was just
the funniest thing. We thought we were pretty creative actually, we thought
we were the most hilarious creative geniuses ever. It stuck and we love
playing the song so we ended up recording it and we owe it all to my friend Melissa.

Tegan on Sara’s “I Bet It Stung”

This is the first song that Sara wrote of the new stuff that got on the record, and
she wrote it probably two or three months after we finished If It Was You,
our last record which hadn’t even come out yet [at that point]. It was the first time
she’d really ever recorded anything on Protools and the demo of it basically sounds
just like the actual recording except with drums and bass. She ran her vocals through
a Sans Amp plug-in, it was really trashy, and it was Sara’s ode to Smashing Pumpkins
and all the hard rock bands she wishes she was in.
She said that that was the type of band she wishes she was in and she wishes the
whole record sounded like that, so we’re gonna throw her out and see how
she does on her own. But yeah, that’s one of my favorite songs and it was
written in a series of songs that didn’t make it on the record that Sara thought
were kind of personal. She was going through a breakup at the time and
didn’t end up wanting to put them on the record but she allowed us to put
“I Bet It Stung” on because it turned out really great and we all really loved it.

Tegan on “Where Does The Good Go”

That was written in the same weekend - my big weekend of pop hits.
“Where Does The Good Go” was along the same lines, and was definitely more written
filtering my own feelings from me. There was a time, well at least for me when
I was in high school, where you have crushes on a whole bunch of different people
and they have crushes on you, and you just feel on top of the world.
And I got out of high school and we were making a record, and I felt so good about
myself. I moved to Vancouver, felt really confident and great. And then I got dumped
and the person changed their phone number and broke my heart and then I had to fire
like my best friend off the road with us. And the first record, when it came out
everybody was talking big numbers and big sales, but it didn’t really do that.
People liked it critically and we got some cool tours but nothing really big happened.
I was all in the dumps and I wrote If It Was You and it was more of a sarcastic
record for me. I was kinda making fun of myself, whereas with this record I feel like
I was still filtering a lot of those emotions and feelings, but this time I was being
more sympathetic toward myself and maybe a little more trying to influence myself
and anyone listening to be wary and be careful. In high school, you feel all on top of
the world and then something like that happens in your life and you realize that
you’re never gonna be the same. And now all of a sudden you have all these
issues you have to deal with and it brings up all these issues from when you were
a kid and things completely change, you know?

Tegan on “I Won’t Be Left”

Again, I’m sorta self-absorbed in that I filter all the emotions from my past relationships
into those songs and lyrics. I’ve never really written a song for anybody before,
but I wrote that for my dad; my step dad and my mom had been together for 15 years
and they broke up when we graduated high school and they’ve been apart for five years
or whatever. And just the way they still talk about each other, not even necessarily like
I think they wanna be together - most times it’s not even positive - there’s just something
about losing 15 years of somebody’s company. There’s music [they used to listen to]
from that time from when I was a kid, and one night I was on the phone talking to him and
he was listening to a song that I remember listening to on the way to Vancouver on
a family vacation, and I just thought, god, to lose something that big and then still
be listening to that music - because you know music can really drag you back -
and I was so distracted the whole time on the phone. I was like,
why is he listening to that? That is so depressing! And I wrote that song right away.

Tegan on Sara’s “Walking With A Ghost”

It’s definitely right around the same theme as “Downtown.” I mean, it’s not my song so
I can’t say directly, but I know the first time I heard that we had flown into London and Sara
pulled her laptop out and played it for me. It was the first song she’d deliberately
written for the record and it sounded so different to me and I thought all the
contributions on the record, like Matt Sharp’s keyboard parts, Rob’s drum part,
really threw me for a loop. I thought it was really creative and I really enjoy playing that
song. I think it’s a cool song. That’s when I sorta got the sense that Sara was gonna write
a really different record than what she’d written before.

Sara on “So Jealous”
I wrote about being really jealous, I’m talking intense jealousy, jealousy that I had
never felt before. The thing that I loved about the chorus in that song is that ‘I can’t even
work’ it’s like I’m exasperated with myself. I was like disabled by it. I was jealous of what
I didn’t have, what I used to have, what I wanted to have, and at that particular time
I was sort of half-dating someone who was in a relationship, so it was an affair.
It was a weird triangle of people and then my ex-girlfriend started dating this guy and then
I felt worse, and then he felt jealous, and it was just like ‘fuck!’ and I was just consumed.

Tegan on Sara’s “So Jealous”

I heard that song the first time around Christmas of 2003 and I was like, whoa,
this is really different. The keyboard sound is this air organ she found on the street
walking home from the bar drunk one night, and it was this tiny plastic air organ and
she ended up using it on “So Jealous” and “We Didn’t Do It”. She wrote those two songs
pretty close together and when she sent those songs down at Christmas I was really
freaked out, like, this is really weird. It actually made me just feel really insecure and
I felt competitive and wanted to write something cool as well. But I love that song and
I love that idea that she’s writing about, missing the West and missing home and being
jealous - I think that’s obviously an emotion every single person deals with and I think
it’s a really good universal theme for our band and our record and I thought it was great.