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Tegan and Sara on Celebrity: 'I Don't Want to Tweet Pictures of My Boobs'

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The word "heartthrob" immediately conjures up images of nostalgic boy bands from decades past and adolescent obsessions over the latest rising star actors sporting mushroom haircuts. Rarely do we think of female stars when that word gets thrown around.

This was just one of the myriad reasons why Tegan Quin of Canadian duo Tegan and Sara liked Heartthrob as the title of their upcoming seventh full-length, set for release Jan. 29.

"I love that it was a term associated with men and that we're re-appropriating it for ourselves," Tegan tells Spinner.

As part of the band's expansion of merchandise (like their T&S sweatpants), they've even created a teen bop magazine of themselves, yet another way of flipping the tables on the gender stereotypes of these nostalgic mags. When she first flipped through their own version of the magazine, she got a rush of "memories of New Kids on the Block and Corey Haim," says Tegan.

Those weren't the celebs that Tegan gushed over when she was a teen, though. Growing up, she and Sara found themselves covering their bedroom walls with pictures of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and sleeping in parking lots waiting for Smashing Pumpkins tickets.

"They were my heartthrobs," she says. "And it wasn't because I wanted to date them, have sex with them, or was attracted to them, I just wanted to be them and I just loved them.

"People are very obsessed with celebrity and Sara and I aren't celebrities. There are fans out there with photos of us on their wall, wearing shirts with our faces on it and it's like, 'how do I reconcile that within myself?' and 'how do I not become weird because of that?'"

Although Tegan and Sara might not necessarily think themselves idols, they understand their fans, of both genders and all ages, sometimes considers them heartthrobs. It's not just a teeny-bopper thing, though.

"There's a lot more diversity in our audience than people give us credit for. And by people I mean journalists," Tegan explains. "They come to the show and they're like, 'It was a gaggle of screaming girls' and it wasn't. [Only some] of our audience is very young and excitable and tweets at us 500 times a day and make their own t-shirts and cut their hairs like us. And I think it's fucking adorable."

Social media has definitely played a part in Tegan and Sara's relationship with fans throughout the years. Feeling the pressure from fans and their label to give more of themselves to the public, Tegan and Sara have developed a number of video series, DVDs and online blogs to keep fans in the loop about what they're doing on top of the usual social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter.

"They want content all the time and I don't want to tweet pictures of my boobs or talk about my private life," explains Tegan about the rules behind their numerous creative projects. For example, their latest string of videos is called Carpool Confessional, a series of YouTube videos documenting the pair as they traveled to and from the recording studio for Heartthrob.

"I don't want to regurgitate everything about my life on social media, so Sara and I have to strategize how do we want to connect with our audience without abusing social media?" she continues. "Plus, we get a lot of people asking us to do reality TV and I don't want anyone to be in control of our image, so I'm like, 'Oh, I'll give you reality TV -- here we are driving to the studio every day!'"

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holu

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January 16 2013 at 4:25 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply