"Closer" by Tegan and Sara, Sunday, September 12, 2021
HERE COMES THE RUSH BEFORE WE TOUCH. “Closer,” Heartthrob’s opening track and lead single, sees the sisters explore new lyrical territory in addition to their musical change up. Tegan sings lead vocals, but Sara encouraged her to sing a straight-up love song, without the dark and dreary lyrical content the group had been known for. According to an article in Rolling Stone, Tegan’s lyrics were about "a time when we got closer by linking arms and walking down our school hallway, or talked all night on the telephone about every thought or experience we’d ever had. It wasn’t necessarily even about hooking up or admitting your feelings back then." In a video series the twins released talking about the songs on the album, Sara pushed the lyrics to "make things physical," referencing high school romance. Tegan best sums up the atmosphere, stating to Rolling Stone, "These relationships existed in a state of sexual and physical ambiguity." The music gives the impression of a late-'80s early-'90s slumber party, with the sisters singing karaoke on ancient, faux wood entertainment stand in which the television is built in--younger millennials may not remember that artifact--and childish games like spin the bottle and applying lipstick. The video celebrates couples of all genders and sexualities. Both Tegan and Sara are openly queer musicians from their musical inception, and have used their music as a platform in recent years to advocate for equality. "Closer" scored a number one hit for the duo on the Billboard's Dance Tracks and has been featured in several television shows including Glee and Bojack Horseman. The song is a beautifully innocent track about desire--wanting to take things to the next level, but being too young, too naive, too shy to do so.
THE LIGHTS ARE OFF AND THE SUN IS FINALLY SETTING. THE NIGHT SKY IS CHANGING OVERHEAD. Before he met Alex Jeong, Josh's friendship had been a series of ambiguity. He thought back to Regan era episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show defined by its stuffy, mostly sexually repressed characters in search of scientific answers in the universe. The series was in contrast to the hot and sweaty original series. Characters in TNG kept everything, mostly, inside their stuffy uniforms with only a few "virus" episodes making them go crazy. Even Deanna Troi was quite a tame-stress. Sex in TNG and pre-puberty was awkward and ambiguous. For starters Josh couldn't understand what the men around him, his father, his uncles, his older cousins, saw in women. He was under a false impression that he had been sent to school to begin courtship, so he found a girl that looked kind of like his mother, a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl by the name of Sara Fiona Horton. "She's adorable," his mother would tease him. But in first grade, Josh's interests were more about making friends with boys. His feelings toward Sara had changed. In the third grade she kissed Josh while lining up for lunch, which greatly embarrassed him. "Don't ever talk to me again," he shouted at her in front of the other kids. He was happy to bury this past when he moved to North Carolina. Middle school was a time of it not being cool to being the most important thing to have a girlfriend. While he was interested in dating, what that time meant going to the movies and sitting in silence with, a couple of the girls at school, when puberty struck, he became more and more withdrawn from the idea of dating. Instead, he put on his repressive TNG suit, figuratively, and buried himself in playing guitar. But interest was developing, though it was hard for Josh to put words to whatever it was. Both male and female friendships grew harder and harder to define. What exactly caused the spark? It couldn’t be that. Could it?
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