“Is it too high?” she calls out. Tegan Quin, Sara’s older sister by eight minutes, stops moving equipment from floor to stage to give her assessment: “No, it’s good.”

Tegan and Sara may have rocked “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” but they’re not too big to help with load-in. You get the sense they’d be rolling up their sweatshirt sleeves even if this were Madison Square Garden.

In an industry that increasingly slices the responsibilities of music making down to smaller and smaller constituent parts, Calgary-born Tegan and Sara are craftswomen. They write the songs. They play the music. They steer the production. They help design the CD covers. Every aspect of the product is smudged with their fingerprints.

Unlike other young performers shot out of cannons toward stardom, 24-year-old Tegan and Sara are patiently steering their careers. After putting out four records and playing together since they were teenagers, they’re steadily building an audience.

“We’re career artists and we’re here for the long haul,” Tegan said during a backstage interview. The Quin sisters’ latest release, So Jealous, will likely be considered their breakthrough record.

This is the album that has critics plowing past the irresistible lure of their packaging (you know, the part about them being hot, gay, identical twins from the semi-hinterlands of Canada) and digging into their real DNA – artful songwriting combined with layered performance.

When people go to a Tegan and Sara show for the first time, they may expect just a powerful recitation of the repertoire. They end up getting more. Tegan and Sara are known for offering up banter that could kill at top comedy clubs.

Fans even trade MP3s of their stage stories, which the sisters swear is unrehearsed and the product of what Tegan calls “verbal diarrhea.”

According to Sara, “We don’t like scripting or anything like that because it would come off as being fake.” Adds Tegan, “Sara and I were in drama club and we excelled at the improv stuff, but we were never good at the acting part. We’re really saturated in ourselves. We have a hard time being other people.”