That’s what I really wanted to emphasize by simplifying the lyrics.
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I worry the song could turn people off because they can’t see themselves within a certain identity. There has been queerness in the mainstream, but it’s usually from the perspective of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” or Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer.” It’s sort of this tourist, “Yeah, I’m cool! I’m open! Whatever!” We are offering a different perspective: that queer voice flirting in the straight world is missing. There’s something subtly revolutionary about imagining a song with that perspective having a big impact on the pop world.
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I’m playing with the idea of gender and sexuality, but I think everybody plays these roles. She actually wasn’t closeted, but in a way our relationship felt closeted because I was ready to take it to the next level and she wasn’t. I was singing about who had yet to declare that she wanted to be in a relationship with me exclusively. But I also think it’s the most digestible, accessible, conventional part of any relationship: the insecurity that every person has where you just want someone to stand up and declare that they’re with you. I’ve had a lot of nervousness with “Boyfriend” as a single, because I hate the idea that it’s only for gay people. I still think when people hear something explicitly queer or “not for them,” it’s hard for them to imagine that the message is transferable. But I also was really struggling with, “How do I do that without alienating another huge part of our audience?” The reality is, as a queer person, I can take any heterosexual song or artist and immediately make it fit for myself, but I don’t know if as a society we’ve been able to do the opposite. Specifically with “Boyfriend” and “BWU,” I did want to be more explicit about the idea of gender roles and the queerness of my own life. Now, it’s a part of songwriting evolution and wanting to use a different voice. I think also as a songwriter, writing to the person as if I was singing directly to that person-that was very intimate to me.
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In a weird way, it never occurred to me to write in that way. We were part of a handful of people who were really talking about it in the mainstream at that time. We looked gay, we talked about being gay. I felt so exposed and visible as a queer person. When I think about those early years of our career, sometimes I felt like, “Oh, the music doesn’t have a sexuality or an overt message of queerness.” When I think about it now, well, I felt so gay. Our vocabulary and understanding of ourselves and the world around us has had an evolution as well. It’s such a complicated thing for me because the evolution of our band has happened over a 17 year period. It just doesn’t play any role in my songwriting or performances. With Heartthrob and this new record, I haven’t even remotely thought about the guitar. A lot of the guitar I did in that era, I wanted it to sound like a keyboard. I think I was already doing that as far back as the Sainthood era. If it does become something that we use in a live show, it’s going to be used in a really different way. We still will play guitar for the old material, but I’m moving away from it in general.
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For me! I’m not making a statement like, “Guitars are dead!” I just haven’t thought about the guitar in terms of songwriting in a really long time. It’s funny, there’s a little bit of tension when Tegan and I talk about this because, for her, this idea of fully departing from any lineage to rock or indie rock, she doesn’t want to completely cut the tie there. Greg claims there is guitar on, I believe, “U-turn,” but I would never be able to pick it out. We didn’t play any guitar, and there was definitely no guitar in our demos. Sara Quin: We had to actually go back to Greg and ask. Namely, is this the first Tegan and Sara album without a single guitar on it? TIME: This album continues the pop sound you introduced on Heartthrob, but it departs in a few radical ways. Below, she fills TIME in on working with Kurstin, writing about each other and whatever happened to those Carly Rae Jepsen sessions. “Because our relationship is in such a good place, it’s easier to start to analyze and look back at just how bad it was at times,” says the band’s Sara Quin.