It sounds like a breakup song.īecause our relationship is in such a good place, it’s easier to analyze and look back at just how bad it was at times. I knew you wrote about your sibling relationship more with this record, but I never would have guessed “100x” was one of those songs. I was really tapping back into how complicated our relationship is. I’m like, “No, I don’t really like that line.” I can see her getting frustrated, like, “I’m just trying to help!” And I’m like, I know.
I’m not saying that in the room, but that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to use our experience as sisters and our conflict when we were younger.
Tegan popped in while I was writing the lyrics, and it was funny because she would pipe up and say, “What if you sing this thing? Or that thing?” And I was like, this is so awkward. We were working with Jesse Shatkin, who had worked with Greg Kurstin on Heartthrob with us.
I was actually in the room with Tegan when I was writing a bunch of that song. There’s always a trick to that, too, because it makes you really vulnerable, specifically on “100x,” because I was pulling from my relationship with Tegan. I really like the songs for this record because I didn’t have to think so hard about trying to say things clearly. I forgot I had said that about writing for other people. I wanted them to be poignant for anyone for a relationship, even a guy and a girl. That’s what I really wanted to emphasize by simplifying the lyrics. 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. 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. 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.
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