Creative Candor

She's never going to pull a Bruce Springsteen and sing about Mary.

Tegan Quinn's songs are so personal, it's almost as if she opens a vein and pens them in her own blood.

As half of twin-sister singer-songwriter duo Tegan & Sara, both openly gay, Quinn's tunes come from a very specific place -- individualized hurts and triumphs -- but the emotions they mine are universal, and so is the way they're presented.

Sexual identity and sexual politics form no concentric circles in Tegan & Sara's catalog, never intersecting, never becoming much of an issue to anyone other than, well, maybe the stray journalist.

"I try to stay gender neutral, because we do have a lot of fans who aren't gay and lots of fans who like boys," Quinn says. "So, I don't want to start singing about 'she,' and then disqualify all those people. I think that's what's going to be Sara and I's success: finding universal themes that are super personal to us that become accessible enough that anyone can relate to."

And increasingly large numbers of people do relate to these two, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

There's not a lot of fence-sitting when it comes to Tegan & Sara: You tend to be all in or indifferent, as they don't have a passive fan base. They trade in raw emotions and that's what they tend to illicit.

To wit, up until just a few years ago, the two used to go and sell and sign their own merch after their shows, even though they long had reached the point where they no longer had to do so on their own.

But even that small gesture began to be too much.

"I loved standing at the merch table at night, meeting people," Quinn says. "It was entertaining. But when we put out (2007's) 'The Con,' it just got too big, and it did get really intense. I think a lot of people really connected to the music in a way that made them feel that they had to meet us. And people have gone to some pretty crazy lengths to meet us. People can be very aggressive, and we're quite little. We've got these big personalities and big voices, but I'm 5 (foot) 2, I'm a little person. And I can't afford security, so I'm not going to go out there with my big beefy security guard. So, we had to draw that line."

But if they draw the line in person, they seldom do so in their songs. What unifies all of the duo's albums is a real, unflinching candor.

And on their latest disc, "Sainthood," the sonics follow suit, as it's one of their most direct efforts.

Whereas its predecessor, "The Con," was a very textured record, with layers of instrumentation and overdubs, a pop jigsaw puzzle with thousands of interlocking pieces, "Sainthood" feels much more streamlined and off-the-cuff. It's still a diffuse-sounding album, zigzagging from the near-punk "Northshore" to sweet-voiced pop with "Alligator" to the moody electro of "Arrow," but it's also a very immediate one.

"We all loved making 'The Con.' It impacted a lot of people," Quinn says. "But we didn't want to repeat ourselves, and Chris (Walla, producer)'s big thing was that he was super sensitive to how hard it was for us to get 'The Con' up off the ground. It easily took us three or four months to get comfortable playing it live.

"He knew that we needed to have our record be a little easier to play," she continues. "So, he basically created this rule that we were going to record live off the floor, that everyone was going to play every take together, and that if you couldn't do it -- like, if you couldn't play the guitar and keyboards ideas that you had in one take together -- then cut one of them. We tried to create a really rich tapestry, but just with five people playing."

To this end, "Sainthood" is a success.

It's a record that benefits from repeated listenings, one that grows on you, every bit as tricky, occasionally confounding and ultimately rewarding as all the sentiment it swims in.

"I have a really good friend who, when we put the record out, was like, 'I love it, but it just feels like you're all over the place,' " Quinn recalls.

"I can see how some people would feel that way. I think that you have to see the links that bond this whole record together, and it's the story that we tell from start to finish. The songs create their own little world, they all work together and they all have their place. But if you're looking at it out of that context, it might seem a little crazy," she chuckles. "But I like that, too."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.