I don’t know why I kept my interest in the guitar a secret from Sara, or why I didn’t just reveal to Bruce that we had found it and that I wanted to learn and take lessons. I also didn’t mention to Sara that when she went to Naomi’s after school in the weeks that followed, I stole the guitar from under the stairs and played it secretly in my room. Neither Sara nor I mentioned finding the guitar to Mom or Bruce that night when they got home. After an hour we carefully returned the guitar to its case and replaced it in the space under the stairs, checking and double-checking we’d left it exactly where we had found it. “Got one.” I handed it back to Sara, sat down across from her, and watched in amazement as she strummed. “Like a pick?” I opened the case and found an orange Dunlop plastic pick. “We need something to like, play the strings with.” “No, I think you’d do it this way,” Sara suggested after a second, pulling the guitar from me into her own lap.
The sound it made was less than inspiring. “This is hard,” I said, plunking the fingers from my right hand along the strings of Bruce’s guitar while my left hand tried to hold the neck in place. “Did Lorraine call your bluff this week?” Mom would ask from behind the steering wheel as we climbed into the Jeep after our lessons.
TEGAN QUIN HOW TO
She only doled out compliments and tips for how to improve. As I stumbled through it, I would promise myself I’d practice more the next week. Eventually, she’d suggest we review whatever piece of music she’d assigned the week before, and my stomach would knot. I think Lorraine let us chatter because she knew we didn’t practice.
Half of our weekly lessons were spent talking, something Sara and I both liked to do a lot more than playing the piano. We both loved Lorraine, even if we didn’t particularly love the piano, or at least not the classical pieces she forced us to learn, or the theory we studied twice a week in her rumpus room. Though neither of us had held a guitar before that afternoon, finding the guitar felt exhilarating, and the desire to play it felt instinctive.Īt this point in our lives, Sara and I had taken nearly a decade of piano lessons from a grandmotherly woman named Lorraine.
TEGAN QUIN TV
Its thick body pressed into my thighs, I wrapped my right arm around it like I’d seen other musicians do a million times on TV and in music videos. Relax.” I folded onto the floor, crossing my legs, and laid the guitar across my lap.
TEGAN QUIN FREE
I reached out and grabbed the neck and pulled it free of the black fur-lined case. Obviously, he wanted to be a rock star, or he was at some point and never told us.” Sara looked at me, twisting her mouth open, raising her eyebrows. I stood alongside Sara and felt a jolt of excitement flood my bloodstream as the yellow body of the guitar was revealed. In the office, she placed the case on the worn gray couch, left over from Bruce’s bachelor days, and popped the gold locks along the perimeter. But once we saw the guitar case, we forgot about what we were searching for and that we were breaking his cardinal rule: never mess with his stuff. I can’t remember what we were actually looking for, what item was worthy of trespassing the only space in the house that was designated for Bruce’s things. One afternoon while Mom and Bruce were out, Sara and I were rooting around in the storage under the stairs when we found a guitar case tucked between two towers of office supply boxes. Read the next chapter, in which Sara Quin recounts the first time the two played the song for their friends, here.
Ahead of the book’s release, read an advance chapter below, titled “Tegan Didn’t Go to School,” in which Tegan Quin recounts how her sister wrote her first song on a guitar borrowed from their stepdad, Bruce. “It is a story of two resilient young women who found their voices through authenticity, connection to others, music, and apparently a lot of experimentation with psychedelics.” “High School provides a purview of the queer adolescent experience,” the duo’s mother writes in a statement found on the book’s website. The siblings wrote the book together, alternating chapters, and across more than 350 pages, they recount their formative years, and the beginnings of their musical collaboration. Twin-sister indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara tell their “origin story” in the upcoming memoir High School.
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