Thursday night’s Tegan and Sara concert was held at the Aladdin Theater—but the Tegan and Sara concert experience began at the dive bar Limp Paw Inn, a block away from the Aladdin, where dozens of queer women and gender-nonconforming people with alternative lifestyle haircuts guzzled down shots and Rainer cans before the show. “Let’s just do one more quick round here, so we don’t have to pay venue prices,” I told my wife at one point, as if we needed an excuse to get a little tipsy for a Tegan and Sara concert, one of the cultural holy grails of contemporary queer life.

Upon entry at the Aladdin, we were each handed a copy of High School, the Quin twins’ new memoir of their teenage years, which came free with our tickets. The Aladdin’s seating chart is a bit confusing, and some seat numbers have worn out over time, so we and a lot of other attendees sat in the wrong seats at first—but everyone was very polite in sorting out their mistakes, confirming what Sara said during the show about their loyal fanbase: “Just a really nice group of people.”

Which brings me to the main event. This wasn’t just a concert; it was a hybrid concert-book reading, with excerpts from the memoir interspersed with correlating songs, many of them off their new album Hey, I’m Just Like You. The album comprises songs Tegan and Sara wrote as teens, which they discovered and re-recorded in the process of writing High School. In a recent review, I praised the album for its balance of earnest lyrics and genre-bending sounds:

The result is a record that boasts both the diversity of sound Tegan & Sara have explored over the last 20 years, and the trademark “ripped-from-a-queer teenager’s-journal” lyrics that first endeared their fanbase to them. In taking this creative risk, Tegan and Sara have made an album that feels almost like a therapeutic exercise: a love letter to all their former selves.

My favorite musical moments from the show, however, came when the duo performed some of their previous tracks—including a wonderfully stripped-down version of sexy pop anthem “Closer,” which took on a new emotional meaning when sandwiched between stories of furtive gay high school relationships.

Tegan and Sara’s concerts have always been known for heavy banter and storytelling in between songs, so the transition to this new hybrid form felt effortless. Memoir excerpts proved the pair are as adept in narrative writing as they are in penning song lyrics, and old home video clips cut the tension with comic relief—including one in which a teenaged Tegan claimed she was straight, and said Courtney Love gave her the “tinglies,” all in the same breath.

The Aladdin is small, and the constant stream of people getting up for beer or the restroom was a little distracting—at one point Tegan and Sara called us the “most up and down crowd” they’d ever played for—but the duo’s strict no-cell-phone policy helped remedy that.

They lifted that policy for the final song, a sweet sing-along rendition of “Where Does the Good Go,” allowing fans to capture their coveted Instagram content. Suddenly I was surrounded by tiny screens, but wishing I could stay in the late-'90s, analog high school world Tegan and Sara had managed to construct for two fleeting hours. Now I can’t wait to dive in to my copy of High School.