Writing about The Con is a daunting task. It’s probably the album that means the most to me on a personal level, the one that’s shaped who I am more than any other collection of music. It’s Tegan and Sara’s magnum opus; there’s not a single misstep from start to finish. For as much as So Jealous is about love and its many complications, The Con is about coping with the moments after love is gone. It’s a deeply pessimistic and unsettling record, consumed by darkness. There’s an honest-to-god message that the sisters are trying to spell out here, but it makes you want curl up in your bed, pull the covers over your head, and never come out.
First, a little history: this was Tegan and Sara’s most collaborative effort yet. While they still wrote their songs separately, they gave more input to each other during the writing process than ever before. Whereas they previously recorded mostly on guitar and only occasionally showed their demos to each other before they got to the studio to start planning the album, they were in constant contact for The Con. “Tegan and I just tried to record everything ourselves in demos: the ideas, drums, bass parts, guitar, keyboards, vocal,” Sara told Ultimate Guitar. “Then we would send the songs to each other. I would send her an MP3 and she would load it into her studio, then she would record over the top of what I had done and add her ideas.” It was a natural expansion from what they had done before and was indicative of how confident they were becoming as musicians. Their collaborative efforts shine on the album — the sisters are completely in sync musically and thematically, which makes The Con feel like their most complete statement. On later albums, they’d begin to credit both sisters for every song.
For this record, they recruited Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla to produce. He saw the potential in their demos and used them as a jumping off point for the studio versions. He tried to recreate the creative process of the demos as closely as possible: he recorded each vocal and instrumental part separately and laid them down on top of each other; he used items like staplers and sunflower seeds to create sound effects. This resulted in an intense intimacy to the album. These aren’t takes that have been practiced over and over again; instead, they relish in imperfections. Elements of the demos show up on every song: the small crackles and pops in the vocals on “I Was Married” were carried over directly from the demos, which Sara recorded with a cheap microphone in her bedroom closet.
Walla’s production was all about the little touches, things that you may not notice until the fifth or fiftieth listen. That’s what makes the album have such a lasting impression and what makes it such a pleasure to revisit. One of my favorite pieces of minutiae is on “Call It Off”: he made drummer (and Death Cab For Cutie bandmate) Jason McGreer record the break down of his drum kit and, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the unstructured percussion pinging away in the background.
Another interesting stylistic choice is that different bassists were used on each sister’s song. Tegan used AFI’s Hunter Burgan, who she was working on a side project with at the time that never came to fruition; Sara chose Matt Sharp, who they had worked with on So Jealous. The change in bassists give each of their songs a distinguishing sound. Another notable collaborator was Kaki King, who contributed her post-rock guitar plucks to “Knife Going In” and “Floorplan.”
The best thing about The Con is how cohesive it sounds. It’s a complete idea from beginning to end. When they went into the studio to record, they had already laid out a track listing and recorded sequentially, beginning with “I Was Married” and ending with “Call It Off.”
"The biggest gift he gave to us was for us to really see the record as a whole. He had already listened to the record prior to recording," Tegan said. “Having someone with such confidence and knowledge gave us a purpose to get up in the morning. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, I don’t want to go to the studio today, it’s a fucking mess I don’t know what’s going on.’ It was like ‘OK today were working on this song, and yesterday we went in this direction so today we should probably take it in a different direction.’ I think that was his biggest contribution, being able to step back and just listen.”
The Con was the sister’s first flirtation with mainstream success. After almost ten years of building up a loyal fan base, it was time to break through to the masses. It was their first release on a major label — shortly after So Jealous, they signed to Warner Bros. imprint Sire. It was also the first time they made their way onto the Billboard chart, debuting at No. 34 on the Top 200. The album produced two internet-ready singles — “Back In Your Head” and “The Con” — with memorable music videos that exposed them to a much wider audience.
But with mainstream success came mainstream criticism, which can sometimes be dismissive and harsh. Two particular reviews threw the proto-blogosphere into a tizzy and both generated responses from the sisters.
One was from Rolling Stone's Robert Christgau, who criticized the universality of their lyrics. “As lesbians who never reference their oppression or even their sexuality, Tegan and Sara don't have men to lash out at, put up with or gripe about. […] Your musical impulse is to empathize, if not identify. But the objects of their romantic ambivalence remain distant — the focus is the singer's feelings, examined rather than indulged.”
Tegan’s response: “I don’t know why it seems it has to be so blatant — I’m writing about relationships,” she says. “I often write about relationships happening around me, and they’re not all gay. And using [gender-neutral pronouns] keeps it universal.”
The other was Pitchfork, which caught some flak for their characterization of Tegan and Sara’s earlier work as “tampon rock.” Tegan: “It’s surprising how big magazines will still write stuff that’s homophobic or sexist. Like, a woman was reviewing us in Pitchfork, and she said The Con was ‘moving us away from the “tampon rock” we used to be.’ And I was like, ‘What, because we have lots of girls in our audience we’re tampon rock?!’ It was so offensive.”
But for the most part, The Con was a huge step forward in how Tegan and Sara were covered: outlets began to move away from the tired talking points of “Canadian! Lesbian! Twins!” and started to focus on the music.
So just what was the music? Well, it was oppressively dark, by far the darkest thing the sisters had done up to that point or would do after.
Society wants us to be happy. Showing emotion is frowned upon. You’re supposed to keep up a front, you’re not allowed to break down or show weakness. The titular “con” is pretending to be happy when you’re not. It’s bottling up your emotions inside. You create an idealized version of yourself to project to the outside world, one that’s acceptable, safe to consume, that no one will be offended by. It’s a constant anxiety, the pressure that you have to look perfect even when you’re crumbling down inside. You can’t be sloppy, you can’t be messy — everything needs to be clean cut and in order.
But society’s goal is unobtainable. "This life looks like a sentence, though/ A constant game of falling short." So where do we turn? To others. But that’s not good, either, because human beings are tricky creatures. We have a tendency to burrow into ourselves when we’re sad, to shut everyone out. We look for fault in everything. Even if we’re happy, we’re always looking ahead to the moment when we’re not, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Find comfort in your boyfriend or girlfriend, but be realistic enough to know that it probably won’t work out in the end, that love doesn’t really last forever. So The Con asks the hard question: is happiness worth it if the heartbreak that comes after is a thousand times more extreme?
It doesn’t come down on one side or the other because there’s really no clear answer. It acknowledges that there are good moments to be savored and treasured, individual moments of love that are worth it. But as a whole, maybe it’s not.
When The Con was written, Tegan had just ended the five-year relationship that had colored so many of her musings on So Jealous; Sara was the one in a stable relationship, but even she was looking towards the inevitable end, which would come just a few months after The Con was released.
Isn’t one heartbreak enough? When will we learn? We carry around our baggage like a semi-truck on our back — "I hold this pain in my heart forever." We’re left with these little, tiny pieces of other people’s broken hearts that taken up space in our own. And the world is expecting us to be happy? Isn’t it enough that we’re just coping, not being crushed under the weight of it all?
So we con ourselves and we con others. We all pretend to be happy and the world goes on. There’s no chance that we’ll ever really be honest with each other, expose our soft underbelly and break through all the bullshit because we’re all too vulnerable and afraid of being hurt. “I think these songs on the record are under the umbrella of what a con represents,” Tegan once said — each song is a different variation on a con, on a lie that we tell ourselves to keep going on. It’s emotionally messy and complex, but brutally realistic. It’s what makes The Con so draining and it’s why an album like The Con will never leave you.
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