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Walla’s production technique involved recording each vocal and instrumental part separately and laying down individual tracks on top of one another, sometimes using household items like staplers and sunflower seeds to create sound effects.

That layering proved difficult to translate into a live performance when the band was rehearsing for their tour, Sara said.

“We definitely struggle with trying to recreate things a lot,” she said. “I think there’s a tendency to want to make it sound just like the album. When it came down to rehearsing the record live, there was this sort of like, ‘oh my God, there’s like five keyboard parts and three guitar parts, and there’s nine vocals that we have to recreate.’ I mean, it was just ridiculous.”

“There’s this moment where you’re kind of like, I love all of the parts and I want them all to be there, but you just start mixing and matching and … you just kind of start picking out the little things that you like. It was like, ‘OK, We have to let go.’”

She pauses, struggling to come up with an analogy.

“It’s like a wall of toothpaste,” she says with a laugh. “You really only have to pick one, but you just have to decide which one is the best one.”

As a result, it was helpful for her and Tegan to have their original demos in mind when they were trying to dissect the album’s tracks in preparation for touring, Sara said.

“I had a moment where I was like, these songs were all born as simple guitar or keyboard and vocal songs and ultimately at the heart of that song is just a vocal and some sort of guitar or keyboard melody,” she said. “It’s easy to recreate live once you start from a very simple place.”

For Sara, the demos also provided a new sense of pride in every aspect of the record, something she says she hadn’t experienced with their earlier albums.

“I feel so much more attached to the music we’re making now because I’m kind of responsible for making so much more of it than we used to,” she explained. “Now, if I listen back to a song and I don’t like the instrumentation, generally it’s me that did it, and so there’s still some attachment to it. There are keyboard and vocal, background or guitar parts that I like almost as much as anything else in the song because I wrote them, and I feel like they’re just almost as important as the vocals. There’s parts of me that like some of the things that we did musically even better than what we did with vocals or even melodically.”

Sara compared listening to their earlier music to looking back on a diary or journal, and says she doesn’t view the experience fondly.

“I’m mortified when I listen to it,” she said without hesitation. “I hate our vocals on our first couple records … and some of the instrumentation. It drives me insane.”

But she and Tegan were just 14 when they began recording songs, Sara’s quick to add, and were still in high school when they wrote their first album.

“I try not to go back and trash (the older music) too much, because I like to think of things that did work,” she said. “I think for 17, 18, 19 year old people, we were writing really strong songs. I don’t necessarily like the songs, and I think we’ve gotten better, but when I think about it now I’m like, you know, there’s strong melodies in almost every song we ever wrote for those albums, and I feel proud of that. I think we had a natural talent for writing music, so I try to sort of focus on the good parts and I try not to cringe at some of the (bad).”

And at the same time, she and Tegan realize that some of their earlier recordings are fan favorites.

“You really have to sort of embrace that stuff because it’s so important to other people,” she said. “I meet kids every day who tell me, oh, This Business of Art is our favorite album and they’ve loved it for like 10 years and I’m like ‘Why? Why, God, why?’”

Sara acknowledges she sometimes feels like a broken record when doing interviews that touch on “generic” fare like the girls’ divergent songwriting processes (Sara’s more idiosyncratic songs are the result of painstaking tweaking, while Tegan churns out catchy pop/rock hooks like it’s going out of style) and the pigeonholes critics can’t seem to get over. (Canadians! Twins! Lesbians!)

“I always remember feeling a bit angsty about press and interviews because there is such a focus on certain things and they just sort of get repeated over and over again,” Sara says. “If these people really wanted to know those answers, they’re out there, a thousand times over. … I would have these moments where I was like, ‘Why do they all want to know the same boring questions and answers? Who cares? Why don’t people have other interesting questions to ask us? Aren’t we interesting? Don’t they want to know about something else?’

“As I get older, I realize that I don’t care as much about that,” she added. “So I feel like I’ve reconciled something about doing press because I’ve like learned that it’s not as important what I think is interesting.”

“I don’t think that the questions are that uninteresting,” she clarified. “I just think that a lot of times the answers are presented in a way that aren’t interesting. And I think that Tegan and I are really interesting because we’re sisters and because we’re twins and we do have very different writing dynamics and those types of things. But a lot of times it’s like, you give a really generic answer because you find the question to be very generic and so then you’ll all end up looking really generic.”

After touring all over the world in support of The Con for the past several months, Sara said she and Tegan notice a “profound” difference among fans in different countries, particularly in reaction to their unique stage shows. Their live performances are characterized by off-the-cuff banter in between songs as the twins recount humorous anecdotes and stories from childhood and occasionally bicker. Their chatter between songs often lasts longer than the tunes themselves.

“Over in Europe (the crowd) changes from country to country,” she said. “The UK, it’s like people are just bananas. They just – they go crazy. They’re totally obnoxious and they’re kind of almost hysterical. And it’s super fun, but you couldn’t do it for much more than like a couple weeks before you’d get probably worn out by it. It’s pretty intense. But then you go to Germany (and Japan) and everyone’s very polite and they’re very quiet and they really absorb what you’re saying and what you’re doing.”

Audiences in their native Canada, for instance, are obviously enthusiastic during performances, but attentive in between songs.

Not true for fans in the United States, according to Sara.

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Elizabeth Raftery is the managing editor of Blast. Follow her on Twitter.