It is probably unprecedented in the career of Tegan & Sara. But the duo is taking a break.
The veteran alt-pop act, made up of Calgary-born sisters Tegan and Sara Quin, was in the spotlight for most of a busy 2024, often for activities outside of their music career. They did a book tour for their second autobiographical graphic novel, Crush, which included a hometown stop for a Wordfest event they did with their mother. At the 2024 Junos in Halifax, actor Elliot Page presented the Quins with a Humanitarian Award for charity work they have done with the Tegan and Sara Foundation to support the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
Meanwhile, Disney+ began streaming Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, an investigative documentary that focused on an online scam that had someone impersonating Tegan and interacting with the duo’s tight-knit fanbase for nearly two decades. Making and promoting that film was emotionally draining for Tegan, in particular. So they decided to take 2025 off from their many pursuits. Well, kind of.
“I don’t want to call myself a workaholic, but I think it’s clear that Sara and I derive a lot of purpose and passion from art and making things, and we have definitely run ourselves into the ground a few times during the course of our career,” says Tegan Quin, in a Zoom interview with Postmedia. “Certainly, during the pop era, from 2012 to 2017, were really brutal years. We went around the world six times.”
The pop era may have been draining, but the period between 2019 to 2024 was perhaps even more hectic and certainly life-altering for both Quins. It began with the 2019 release of their bestselling memoir High School, which chronicles their origin story in northeast Calgary. It was adapted for an Amazon Freevee series in 2022. During that period, they also put out two records, a documentary, two graphic novels, plus “an assortment of weird, random things.” The duo left both Warner Bros., their label of 14 years, and their management of 20 years. In June 2022, Sara became a mother after welcoming a baby boy with her partner.
So, what does a year or two off actually look like for a chronically busy Tegan and Sara?
“I woke up in the fall of last year, I had COVID and wrote Sara and said, ‘I think we should take at least a year off, maybe two,” says Quin. “We had a lot of back and forth defining that. We’re still making things. We’re still being creative but just taking our workload down by 90 per cent. We’re not doing any merchandise. We are not doing any fan club. We’re not doing Substack. We’re not doing any social media.”
And for the most part, they aren’t doing media interviews either. Chatting with Postmedia last week was only the second interview she has granted in 2025.
Which brings us to the question of why Quin is doing this particular interview. Apparently, even when Tegan and Sara don’t have anything to officially promote, they still have things they want to promote. Last week, a new podcast was released that detailed Tegan’s struggles with nicotine addiction. The Quitting Made Real Podcast is a promotional tool for Nicorette, which designs products to help people quit smoking. Quin is one of a number of public figures — others include Calgary-born comedian Ryan Belleville, sportscaster and former Calgarian Tara Slone and ultra-marathoner Ray Zahab — featured on the podcast. While the 45-year-old Quin quit smoking before she was 30 and was always reluctant to call herself a smoker, she did embrace the habit in her 20s during the band’s early tours as a way to deal with breakups and other pressures. Unlike others who spoke on the podcast, Quin considered herself a social smoker and says she could go long periods without having a cigarette.
“But I always wanted to smoke, whether I was actually doing it or not, so quitting was really hard,” she says. “Increasingly, people around me — with Sara being the loudest voice of that — would say, ‘Just stop, it’s so gross. It’s so bad for you.’ The idea of what a smoker is, once I unravelled that, I was still a person who was at the mercy of an addiction.”
Inspiring people to quit smoking is a noble pursuit on its own, but Quin says she also decided to do the podcast because it fits into a larger effort to “pull back the curtain” on Tegan and Sara’s public persona and reveal their struggles and flaws. The memoir was their first attempt to “come down off the stage, come out of the lights, take off all that veneer and just be ourselves,” she says.
“We were little dirtbags who grew up in northeast Calgary,” she says. “We did not launch our career thinking, ‘We’re going to make a foundation and become lesbian icons.’ None of that. We were just little shits trying to figure out how to make our way in the world. We were really lucky and were helped by a lot of amazing people.”
The Quins executive produced the series based on the High School memoir and were on set for the Calgary production back in 2022. A second season was written but was eventually dropped after the writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 caused too many delays, Quin says.
She initially planned to tell the story about the fake Tegan, or Fegan, in a podcast before being convinced it could be made into a documentary. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara had Quin and director Erin Lee Carr attempting to unmask Fake Tegan and sitting with fans who had been hoodwinked by Fegan and, in some cases, entered into online relationships with the imposter that lasted years. It was a harrowing tale that showcased the dark side of fame and the toxicity that can come with fan culture in the age of the Internet.
“I don’t regret doing it, I just don’t think I comprehended how stressful it would be,” Quin says about the documentary. “It was more stressful than going through it. Reinvestigating it was very hard. All the additional stuff we uncovered was really hard. There were people that we interviewed who were still like, ‘Well, maybe it’s you.’ Having to sit down with people who didn’t believe me or people who had done really sh-tty things and to have to be kind and compassionate was hard. I got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. It was a crazy time. On the other side of it now, a year past, artists still reach out to me. I’m glad that it’s there for fans, of course. But I’m glad it’s there for artists. Several artists have reached out because this happens to all of us.”
