Tegan and Sara are bringing their ‘Crybaby Tour’ to the First Avenue Mainroom on Sunday, November 6th!
Tegan and Sara are still evolving the way they collaborate, even twenty years into recording together and twenty more as twin sisters. For their tenth studio album, Crybaby, they got inside each other’s songs in a whole new way. “This was the first time where, while we were still drafting our demos, we were thinking about how the songs were going to work together,” says Tegan. “It wasn’t even just that Sara was making lyric changes or reorganizing the parts to my songs, it was that she was also saying to me, ‘This song is going to be faster,’ or ‘It’s going to be in a different key.’ But Sara effectively improves everything of mine that she works on.” Sara adds, with a laugh: “Maybe I am the renovator. I’m the house-flipper of the Tegan and Sara band,”
The reality is that Sara did step up greatly in her role as a producer for this exciting, elevated collection of songs, which began with her glitchy lo-fi demos for “I Can’t Grow Up” and “All I Wanted.” She says: “I’ve been joking about making ‘my bedroom electronic record’ for the last twenty years. I’ll make these instrumentals with vocal ad libs, and I’m basically always working on it. When the pandemic started, I would go to my little studio and mess around – not really thinking about making an album for Tegan and Sara, just thinking about how to get through the day and not collapse under stress and anxiety about the pandemic. I started fooling around with a very simple sampling app called Keezy, using it to make all sorts of vocal samples, and that’s how those songs began.” Tegan remembers Sara sending her those demos and instantly feeling inspired by them. “They felt very new and fresh and really different from anything we’d been doing,” she says.
Tomberlin will be opening the show. Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek, and her debut album, At Weddings. It all happened fast: Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP followup to At Weddings, though she recorded it in Philadelphia.
Tickets are still available HERE!
