I Was Married by Tegan and Sara

Sara: 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.

Soil, Soil by Tegan and Sara

Tegan: This song was about a break-up of course. The pain was still new and fresh. I kept calling my ex and calling her. She didn't want to hear from me. So, I wrote a letter to this girl and I didn't have to courage to give it to her so I just tucked it away in one of my notebooks somewhere. It's the feeling of heartache after a relationship is over and knowing that you won't be with that person again.

I Won't Be Left by Tegan and Sara

Tegan: 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.