Sophia Michaels
Tegan and Sara are having a hard time letting go. The duo recently appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to perform the pulsating synth-pop single “I Can’t Grow Up,” released alongside their tenth studio album Crybaby, shared late last month.
Joined by their band, the duo rocked through the song with sustained energy, asking on its hypnotizing chorus: “How do I know when it’s time to let go?” Their performance took place in front of a neon backdrop replicating the fractured ice cream cone from the Crybaby album cover, with two smaller cones dripping from their mic stands.
Tegan and Sara pondered the idea of letting go of the past in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “I think that it is a fine line to mine our stories, our youth, our life, so intensely,” Tegan shared. “I’m not going to do a great metaphor here, because I’m going to try to do a metaphor about mining and I actually don’t know anything about mining. But I hope it is not an ugly, barren, gross plot of land that we look back at and go, jeez, we really mined that to shit.”
She added: “I hope what we’re actually doing is — this is gonna get real cheesy — I hope we’re not stripping it, we’re planting trees. I think by sharing, we’re hopefully evolving and growing, not just going inside ourselves being like, ‘All right, what else do I got in here?’”
Crybaby is full of coming-of-age stories and the uncomfortable understanding of maturity and self-doubt that often accompany them. Like “I Can’t Grow Up,” other songs like “High School” and “Whatever That Was” glance back as a means of moving forward.
