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Tegan and Sara, the twin sister duo, are finally ready to talk about high school. While others might shy away just thinking back on it, the LGBTQ icons pored over music, journals, and film from those years — and went public with it. The result: their memoir “High School” published this past September, accompanied by a new album “Hey, I’m Just Like You.” As such, the album explores music they originally wrote during their tumultuous and explorational high school years, re-recorded. The sisters revisited the memories of their younger selves 20 years later, and their heartfelt performance at the Wilbur on Oct. 25 paid homage to this process.
The performance opened with Tegan emerging from stage right against a simple backdrop of neon light that split the stage in half, one side blue and the other yellow. A lone set piece — a bookshelf stocked with 12 thin booklets — sat center stage. Tegan began with a commentary on memory — a concept that permeated the evening. “It’s a great comfort to go through life with a witness,” Tegan said, referring to Sara, seated at the piano across the stage. With that, the lights dimmed, and Sara on piano and Tegan on guitar, the pair began their night of music with their latest album’s titular song, “Hey, I’m Just Like You.”
After the song, the two walked up to the microphones for a more official introduction. They set “ground rules,” including limiting noise during the spoken word portions of the evening and turning phones off. They emphasized that they wanted to make this year’s performances different from their previous tours.
“We’re trying to create a ‘90s, intimate space here,” Tegan said.
And that they did. The general pattern of the night consisted of spoken word by one sister in silence, sometimes accompanied by light acoustic backing, found footage from the pair’s early years, and acoustic versions of the album’s songs, with breaks indicated by the dimming of the lights. The variety of mediums breathed life and performance into the multifaceted perspective of the album and the duo’s high school years, as opposed to the limited story gleaned from just the music. Additionally, the musicians’ decision to not dichotomize the performance through only spoken word and music is ingenious — the use of multiple mediums alleviated the friction that would otherwise be present between just two opposing media. Through such a seamless delivery, Tegan and Sara immersed the audience in their coming-of-age story.
The twins used this format to cover a breadth of topics relevant to ‘90s adolescence. Tegan began by discussing sibling woes and how little she and Sara got along when they were young. Interestingly enough, drugs were the catalyst for their changed relationship.
“Sara and I, we noticed while we were high, we got along,” Tegan said. “It cracked open a creative mountain for us.”
They then spoke about euphoric discovery of music and how they both, independently of one another, became obsessed with this instinctive need to make it.
“I felt a jolt of excitement as the yellow body of a guitar revealed itself,” Tegan said, going on to talk about the long hours spent playing it. “What I didn’t know was Sara was doing the same thing when I wasn’t around.”
In a way, the whole performance is a period piece — everything the twins put together is so ‘90s. Through a patching together of spoken word, light ambient acoustic, music, and film, they transported their audience to their past lives. As the show nears its end, Tegan and Sara advised us on our own tendencies to dismiss our pasts.
“By rejecting your younger selves, you’re rejecting a big part of who your are,” Tegan said. The image of the duo’s younger selves obtained from the show is inseparable from their personas in the current, as the same is probably true for the rest of us.
