This is actually the one that gives me the most The Con vibes.

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TEGAN: It's funny cause it’s going to be another one of those songs that people are like, “I got married to ‘U-Turn’ cause it's all about writing a love song!” And I'm like, That is one of the most dick-y songs I've ever written. I'm making fun of love. Like, OK, I'll sit down, and put my pride aside, and I'll sit there and fix it up. You deserve a love song—cause you never ask. But I know, people are just going to line up just to tell me how romantic it is, and how they got married to it.

My real questions is: obviously you’ve made a significant change to your sound over the past few years. People used to say, “Tegan is more punk, Sara is more pop.” Did Sara win? Was there a specific moment of compromise that got you to where we are today?

TEGAN: Sara put it really well the other day when she talked about the fact that there was definitely a point in the middle part of our career — like post-The Con, but it started even on The Con — where we started to kind to form into two separate bands. And I think there was a lot of emotional struggle around that time because we were allowing ourselves to be those two different bands. We were living such different lives, and we were in such different emotional places. But all of these things are what makes up Tegan and Sara, and without that struggle, without that independence, we wouldn't be the band we are. We wouldn't be making music.

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I think we have grown into a more cohesive band because, instead of compromising, we are learning how to share and listen. I think we both love pop music, both love electronic music. There certain levels of production that we really love. And because we found all this common ground, it’s not a compromise, we're just attenuating and exaggerating the thing we both love rather than being like, “This is what I like and this is what you like and we'll just both do it cause we just that kind of band.”

When it comes down to who won, I think we both realized that we had to have some really big, intense, hard talks before Heartthrob. It felt like there were only two paths. There was a path where we both were happy, or there was a path where we quit. So do you want to be on the path where we quit, or do you want to be on the path where we are happy? And we're both on the path where we are both happy.