With the January 29 release of Tegan and Sara’s seventh album, Heartthrob, fast approaching, the Quin sisters are dropping aural gifts left and right. Last week we heard their pepped-up take on the Rolling Stones’ 1976 ballad “Fool to Cry,” which was recorded exclusively for the soundtrack for HBO’s Girls, and now we have a similarly themed original, “I Was a Fool.”
Glamour debuted the piano-powered song, which finds Tegan recalling the end of a relationship and taking pride in the fact that she did her best to see it through. The idea, she explains in the “Track by Track” video shared beneath the song, was that “I repeatedly packed my bags and didn’t leave, I just stood still [and] that relationships like mine don’t get fixed, they just stay the same.”
After explaining that she thinks the pair too often come out as “losers” in love, Sara quips back, “Do you feel like you’re Betty Draper?” The influence of a strong leading lady, however, can clearly be felt on “I Was a Fool” — the brightly lush backing track, plus the twins’ vocals, recall Kate Bush in part, who the girls mentioned as an influence when SPIN visited them in the studio back in April.
