Tegan Quin remembers the festival lineups of the early aughts in one blunt line: "Holy shit, it's all men." If you pointed it out, she says, people would immediately name the one band with a female keyboard player, like they had it written on their hand.

That's where our latest bonus interview for 2004: The Year Indie Rock Broke begins. Tegan and Sara put out So Jealous in 2004, landed "Walking With a Ghost" on the radio, and toured with The Killers. Even so, Tegan calls them "the most famous band you'd never heard," because everyone had an opinion about what they sounded like and few had actually listened. They were identical twins, openly gay, and almost always the only women on the bill.

The press made that distance concrete. Tegan describes being reviewed by men decades older than her whose reference points were decades out of date, which is how two twenty-somethings kept getting compared to artists 20 or 30 years older. Photo shoots meant stylists arriving with thigh-high boots and dresses sized for someone far taller than two 5'2" musicians. Their publicist once jogged 30 blocks to a Macy's to find clothes that fit.

She tells one story that shows where the power sat. Pitchfork called The Con "tampon rock," and Tegan recalls that a homophobic line about Death Cab was pulled from that review while the insult aimed at her band stayed. She watched her sister Sara live for years with the fear of the next review, and later push back on the violent comments under a music site's coverage, a story we'll leave for the full interview.

Why was indie so white, so male, so straight? Tegan's answer is more personal than most we heard. Many of the men, she says, loved the community: The van, the beers, the bros. She had no community, so what fed her was seeing the band climb and the audience grow. The scene's ceiling was "you should just be happy with what you got," with a slacker cool that made being liked or played on the radio suspect. Tegan and Sara wanted all of it, and she's blunt about why: "We're queer women. We had to become aspirational because nothing was handed to us."

Then there's the part she says she struggles with most. Their biggest breaks, from Neil Young to The Killers to Death Cab, came from men, and she's grateful for every one. But she keeps asking where the women were. Not one, she says, offered mentorship, which is why she and Sara now reach out to young queer and women artists. She doesn't want indie rock canceled, either. She wants the whole scene celebrated, not only the men at the top of it.

The full conversation goes further, from sexism at radio stations to a Coachella set played with whooping cough, plus the t-shirt of terrible reviews Tegan pitches to her team every year. If you want bonus interviews like this one as they drop, subscribe. For subscribers, the bonus interview is below.