• According to this news post from their website, their record company declined to fund the music video, so they sold T-shirts with storyboards of the video on it to fund it.

Interview from 2003:

Interviewer: With Living Room, did you literally live that close to someone?

Tegan: Yeah, just imagine a piece of glass in front of me and a piece of glass in front of you. Sara, she'll back me up.

Sara: It seemed a lot closer, because it was windows looking into windows, but it wasn't that close.

Tegan: It was pretty close.

Interviewer: And they just left their windows open all the time.

Tegan: That's the thing is that they kept their windows closed all the time. They had blinds. I lived there for six months and they only opened up them twice. The two times that they opened them up, one time was the day I moved out and the time before was two nights before I went home for Christmas. I went to bed and just couldn't sleep. […] I was really sick. I couldn't sleep and like probably about 2:30 in the morning, I don't like to take cold medication, but I finally decided I'm going to take some cold medication. I went out into the living room, and I was like, "something feels weird" and I was all groggy and I was like, "It's light. It's light in my room." I looked over and their windows were wide open. There was this man standing there like the huge guy, big, fat guy, hairy, no shirt on and he was really scary looking and he's staring into my apartment and it was dark and there was this frail little, young probably in her mid thirties woman balling hysterically and they're both just standing there. I was like, "What the fuck?" I thought it was so weird and I kind of sulked to the bathroom and took my medication. On my way back they closed the blinds, and the next morning I woke up and we were catching a cab to go home to Calgary and I wrote the lyrics and was kind of just fiddling around with it and was frantic 'cause I really liked it. I hated most of the song. The only part I liked was the chorus the "Spend all night". I liked that part and it was a little bit different, it was a lot slower. I recorded it really quick and I brought it home and played it for Sara and my Mom and I sang it really out of tune, but it was in our heads. So, when we got home I changed it up a bit and I didn't like it, couldn't figure it out with the band, nobody could figure it out. All of us were really struggling with it. We went in to record the album, it was the last song we did bed tracks for, like the drums and bass and we recorded it kind of Fleetwood Mac-ie. Like the drums were really different than they are on the album, and really didn't like. Brought a friend in to do the banjo part and he did a whole different banjo part. They kind of spliced it and moved it around. When the banjo was done, I liked it a lot better. Sara went in one night when I wasn't there, and did the vocal part and as soon as the vocal part was there, I loved the song. I was like, "Okay, Now this makes sense to me again." It kind of gave me back that initial energy I had when I did the demos. Sometimes, something about the demos is that you can hear all of the potential. That's what I like about being able to record myself is I can hear the potential, but then when we took it to the band it kind of squashed all the potential. It straightened it out and I hated it. So, when the banjo and Sara's vocals came on, it was messy potentially. It was gonna be good again, but it just never came around. It just never happened. [...] I was feeling frantic 'cause I just didn't think we were gonna putting that one on. We have to have eleven songs on our record, it's in our contract, and there was only ten. So, I was like, "What happened with 'Living Room'?" They both turned around and looked down at us, and they both started to giggle and they're like, "Well, this one we went a little crazy on." It's completely different. Like the song is exactly the same, like me singing and the song is the same, but they put the drums in and sampled part of the drums that Rob had taken out. They played the bass on it. The keyboards, the slide guitars, the banjo, everything was sampled completely different except for Sara's vocal and my vocal and the guitar. We just loved it. It brought back all the potential of that night. It's probably one of the most quirky songs I've written. Play it live and it's definitely a lot more rock, but when we listen to it it's definitely really quirky. I don't know, there's something about that moment. You can't imagine it until you're in that moment. Where I lived in that apartment and the first week I was so depressed that my windows were so close, and that there was no sunlight coming in, but there was something so close about being so close to that building and they always had their blinds shut. That song is like a joke. Almost making fun, like the line, "I spend all afternoon on top of you." I got to the point where I would come out of the shower naked and walk through my apartment even though their blind were right there. So, the song has a really weird vibe. When I sing it it's really funny 'cause it's one of the only songs I've ever written that had not very much to do with me. All it had to do with me was that I thought it was really sad that she was crying. Like, it was such a weird odd moment. So, I tried to sort of act as if I knew her or something when I wrote it. So, it was one of my quirkier songs I suppose.