“I was using age as a metaphor. I was saying, at 19 I had gotten out of a five year relationship, and instead of writing about that relationship, I jumped into a new relationship. I was amazed and terrified and saddened, but also excited and totally mystified at how it was possible at 26 I was feeling the same things I was feeling at 19. How is it possible that I haven’t learned something? That I’m back in the same place suffering and tormented? Don’t I get a “Get out of jail free” card or a pass or something to get beyond the stage of being tormented by love? So I think that at 37 this song would sound exactly the same. We do the same things over and over again. That’s what’s so great and so horrible about love and the human condition. We will love and torment and get hurt and break our hearts, and then go right back to it. We love it, we’re addicted to it, it’s how we survive. It’s where we derive so much of our passion from.” - Tegan in 2007

“[Nineteen] was probably the first song that I wrote that had a connection with the audience, which I hadn’t yet had a song accomplish. It was sort of obvious right from the beginning that it was gonna be everybody’s sad, weepy breakup song. Even when I wrote it, I remember calling Sara and her girlfriend in the middle of the night in Montreal and telling them to wake up and go listen, and I was like, “I think I wrote something really sad, accidentally.” It was very cathartic, which throughout the early part of our career, I had rejected that word — like when people would be like, “Do you find writing cathartic? It’s like reading out of our diary” — because I thought it was really sexist. But that was the moment where I was like, no, no, this really is cathartic to sing this, to scream on stage every night, and watch everyone else scream along. When I say exactly how I feel, it really seems to connect. It still feels the same performing it now, though obviously, we’ve updated it. Our musical director suggested doing it on piano, and it really transports me back to the first few times we played it live. It feels very emotional — lots of tears in the front row. I have to kind of not look because it makes me very sensitive.”- Tegan in 2016