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Sister-bandmates Tegan (right) and Sara Quin relax backstage during the first day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. (Chris Pizzello / AP)

Tegan and Sara may be the best reality TV series you'll never see.

The 27-year-old twin sisters, vocalist-guitarist Tegan Quin and vocalist-keyboard player Sara Quin, have released five albums since 2000. A tour to promote current recording "The Con" will bring Tegan and Sara to the Murat Egyptian Room on May 8.

"We've had the offers from the MTVs of the world to have more exposure on the band and to follow us around," Tegan says. "I understand that would be great exposure for our band, which isn't always in the mainstream. But for us as people and normal human beings, it doesn't make a lot of sense."

Meanwhile, the Canadian duo shares its behind-the-scenes laughs in a series of online videos titled "Trailer Talk" and "Backstage Bilingual."

During a recent interview, Tegan talked about her music, home movies and hometown:

As musicians, you and Sara almost live a parallel existence with the underground and the mainstream. Do you see it that way?

Definitely. In a place like New York, we sell out 3,000 tickets months in advance. But then we'll go to some smaller cities and we're absolutely an underground band. We are not being played on rock radio, and teenagers at the mall won't swarm us. In Portland, Ore., they would. So we're always skipping over the line between the mainstream and the underground. If we were doing one or the other, I think I would feel stagnant and bored.

You and Sara are singing together more on your songs. What inspired that?

In the past, we'd go into the studio and sing our own background parts for our own songs because we were moving so quickly and had limited time and a limited budget. Live, we'd sing background parts for each other and people would say, "It sounds so good. It sounds different than the record." I didn't understand at the time, but I think what really excited people was hearing us collaborate with one another live. Our voices are very similar, but they're not identical.

You seem to enjoy making online videos for your fans. What do you like about doing that?

It's gracious of you to think that we do it for our fans, but I think we really are making them for ourselves at this point. We're certainly happy to put as much content out there as possible. If it entertains people, we'll probably keep doing it. The combination of having all these fun ideas and knowing there's a lot of kids who are just following us on the Internet because we're never going to get to the little town they live in is kind of exciting.

You grew up in Calgary, which has a reputation for being a rodeo town. Is that a fair depiction, or has the city changed in recent years?

It has that stigma, which is partially because we're surrounded by hours of prairie land. But Calgary also is a pretty big metropolis. It's actually a very rich, oil-centric city. Most people, though, would never visit Calgary without the Stampede, which is three weeks of great rodeo and a gigantic summer festival. Everyone walks around in cowboy hats during those three weeks, but I assure visitors that, aside from those three weeks, you rarely see a cowboy hat in Calgary.

If you consider "The Con" an evolution of your sound, what's next?

All the stuff we've been writing so far is in the same vein. I think we write in two album cycles. The next record, whatever it is and whenever it comes out, will be the conclusion of "The Con's" idea.

Tegan and Sara

When: 7:30 p.m. May 8.

Where: Murat Egyptian Room, 502 N. New Jersey St.

Tickets: $20. For more information, call (317) 239-5151 or visit www.ticketmaster.com