Interview from 2009:

Interviewer: I think “Someday” is one of the greatest things you and Sara have ever done. It reminded somewhat of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” and I don’t know why, saying, “Mark my words, I might be something, someday.” What a gut punch.

Tegan: Well, thank you! The short answer to that is… well, there is no short answer! My parents got divorced when we were five. Then my mom met someone else when we were six or seven, and they fell in love in front of us. It was incredibly influential on Sara and I. Love was super important, and love was wrapped up with music. Our stepdad was obsessed with music. We had Bruce Springsteen posters in our house; framed, mind you, but still our household was a rock and roll household.

When it came time to pick what we were going to do with our lives, it was Grade 12, we were 17 years old. We had no aspirations to go university. We wanted to travel and play music. We didn’t want to sign record deals or any of that stuff. And here we are, 10 years later, and we’re still doing that, and I think that both of us have struggled over the past 11 years with the idea that [it] is our career path. It’s somewhat unstable at times, and unless you achieve a certain level of success, you’re going to have to either, A: get a job eventually, or B: you’re going to struggle for a long time, and potentially your whole life. We’ve been so lucky and extremely business savvy and aggressive about our business because we’re taking care of ourselves and looking out for our future.

I think that ‘Someday’ in part is about this idea that I’m speaking in part to myself; that I made a good decision, and I’m gonna be okay, and I am proving myself. At the same time, I had just started dating this girl that I had chased for three years… that I wrote The Con about, and it was a complicated situation. I had just gotten out of a five-year relationship, and was having a difficult time figuring out how to get what I wanted, and I took all the wrong interstates, basically, and sort of floundered for a year. And then it was over. It just didn’t work out. We never got to date. I felt horrible, and wrote all the songs on The Con about it, and then spent a year out on the road playing them, feeling vindicated and powerful and sad all at the same time. And then we started talking again because she wanted to be friends, so I said, ‘OK, we’ll see what happens.’ Six or seven months went by, and she was like, ‘Fuck, I’m totally into you, and I keep denying myself. Let’s just try dating.’ So I wrote ‘Someday’ two or three months into that, when I was like that weird kid trying not to explode in class. Just really trying to contain myself. I didn’t want to go off the path. I did not want to become that weird creep from The Con.

So, ‘Someday’ was sort of a combination of me saying, ‘You have purpose, you are good, you are going to make it, you are going to say something. Maybe you already have said it, but you’re going to say something important.’ And at the same time, it was my way of pushing this button on this person, to basically say, ‘Get it together, decide!’ Everyone can say something important, which is why I said, ‘paint…write…and say,’ because not all of us are writers and not all of us are artists or painters, but all of us will eventually say something. We’ll all get there, whether it’s at 75 or 15, we do get to a place where we figure out what our purpose is. And for The Con, the girl that I was chasing, for her, it was that moment, I think, when she finally took a step forward and realized that she was going to have to challenge herself and her life, and what she thought of herself at that point.

I love that song. When I recorded it, it was madness, like 8,000 keyboards and vocals. Someone compared it to MGMT the other day.