Tigirlily – sisters Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh – hail from North Dakota and they are set to release their self-titled EP on Friday 9th July 2021.
Part of social media collective The 615 House, Tigirlily have been harnessing the power of social media to get their music out there and they caught the attention of Monument Records, which signed them to a deal. Packed with personality and strong songs, Tigirlily could very well be the next big act in Country music.
I caught up with Kendra and Krista recently to talk about their EP, discuss how they harnessed social media to get their music out there, and to talk about their plans for the rest of the year…
I’ve been speaking to so many people in your circle over the past few weeks such as Ashley Cooke, Priscilla Block and Walker Hayes, that I feel I’ve been working up to this interview…
Kendra: Thanks for having us. It’s fun to see Walker’s song blowing up this two weeks. We’ve been writing a lot with Walker and he actually has two songs that he wrote with us on our EP coming out. We love him. We love Ashley. Love them all. We did The 615 House stuff with Ashley and Priscilla so it’s really cool.
Have you been giving Walker TikTok tips by any chance?
Krista: I think honestly, he’s got to give so much credit to his daughter. I’m sure his daughter knows the dance trends because Walker’s like, ‘I think I have TikTok but I don’t really scroll through too much. I’m sure his daughter was like, ‘hey Dad, these are the TikTok moves and let’s do this dance. His daughter’s probably just beaming right now.
Your self-titled EP is coming out this week. Why did you decide to put out these five songs now?
Kendra: I feel like since we signed to Monument Records, we wanted a project that represented all parts of who we are. We really feel like every song on this EP is very different from one another but each song shares insight into what Tigirlily is and what we’re all about. It talks about friendship, it talks about home, there’s some inspiration there, there’s some sassy, and there’s just all these different parts of who we are. We think it’s a really good showcase of that.
Krista: We’re sisters and we’ve been doing Tigirlily together for eight years now. We do have a lot of existing fans that know us really well but also, we haven’t been introduced to most of the Country audience yet. We felt like with Monument, there’s gonna be a lot of people who already are familiar with us, but also a ton of people who have never heard of Tigirlily so we were like we need five songs that if someone just plays all 17 minutes through, (they’ll know) this is who we are.
Something that has been missing in Country music for song long is personality and your EP has it in abundance. Was it important for you to get your personalities across in your music?
Kendra: Oh, absolutely!
Krista: That was important but I don’t even think we thought about that necessarily while recording.
Kendra: We just have a lot of personality (laughs).
Krista: Kendra does main vocal and how she sings and how she records, she doesn’t try to lay it on that’s just how she is.
Kendra: We grew up listening to Sugarland and I always thought Jennifer Nettles had so much personality in her voice. I was like, ‘that’s how I want to be as a singer. I want to have that personality. I don’t have to be Beyonce, or anything like that, I just want fun personality to shine through and when people hear us they go, “Oh, that’s Tigirlily”‘. For you to say that is really cool because that’s, for sure, the goal in all of this for people listening to be like, ‘oh, that’s fun’ or ‘that’s a little sassy’. People can just put it on in their car and drive to work and be like, ‘that made me feel better today. I am ready to get my day started’. It’s all live band, there’s no tracks in it or anything, so it has a really organic live band feeling like The Chicks, Sugarland and The Band Perry, things like that that are so huge. Hopefully maybe we can fill that gap now doing this.
You’ve been used to sharing your personalities via social media so I guess as this point that comes naturally. Would you say social media is integral to your careers?
Krista: Yeah. We started out playing a bunch of live shows and YouTube but with the pandemic, I feel like we made the extra switch like, ‘we can’t play live shows anymore. We need to hit this social media thing hard’ and we did not know what we were doing on TikTok.
Kendra: We still don’t (laughs)
Krista: I forced Kendra and she was like, ‘I’m too old for this app, whatever’. We 3 million views on this little tutorial, which is stupid, so I suggested we put our music on there and see what happened. We started doing simple, in our kitchen, little singing videos and harmony challenges and showing our original music, and it just took off, which is awesome. It gave us the chance to introduce our music to new people. I would say at the bottom of it all TikTok is just another way for us to connect with fans and for us to share our music with people.
Kendra: It’s how you use it. We do the fun trends and the fun dance trends. We did Walker’s dance trend that he has going on right now but we also just like to sit in our kitchen and share our favorite covers or share original music. It’s all about how you use the platforms. At the end of the day, people just want to get to know, who is Tigirlily, who’s Kendra and who’s Krista. They want to know our personalities and what we love in life and our families, even my husband. They just want to get to know you. I think that’s the really cool part about social media is people really can feel like they know who you are through that.
I was having a look at your TikTok earlier and your views are so impressive but I can see that some videos blow up and some just do really well. How do you decide what content to push out?
Kendra: When we started TikTok, I feel like because everyone was at home our views were massive all the time. Once everyone started getting back to normal a little bit more, we’d have one video just blow up and then the next one would just be normal. It wouldn’t be bad it just wouldn’t get 500,000 views, and then we’d be disappointed. We’re at the point now where you just have to consistently post content and you have to be fine with whatever does take off in the algorithm because you can’t predict it. We post stuff and we’re like, ‘whatever takes off takes off, but we’ll just keep posting’ (laughs).
Krista: There’s no predicting the algorithm. Things we think will do really well switches sometimes. We’re very content with putting out good content and things we think that we’re proud of. Whatever TikTok chooses to do with it is really out of our control.
I can see the power of social media from when we posted about your EP and the engagement was crazy. You’ve obviously harnessed it in a very beneficial way. Have you found fans reaching out to you outside of the US?
Krista: It’s crazy because when we released ‘Somebody Does’ it actually went number one in Australia and the UK too. To see that song, especially, other people in other countries are listening to it, I don’t know if we’ve really felt that full effect before and now we’re like, ‘okay, well now we have to go tour over there obviously. It’s so cool. We look at our Spotify listens and I think Australia is still one of our top listened to places and the UK. We’ve never been to any of these countries so it’s really cool for us to see that music can still reach across the entire world and that’s how powerful music is. You really step back and you’re like, ‘this song is bigger than us and it’s reaching more people’. I think that’s the coolest part about it for me, honestly.
Krista: And it’s so cute. Our Australian fans, the day of a release they’re way ahead so they’ll be like, ‘oh, we’re already listening to your new song’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t even access it yet’ (laughs). Australian fans are always on the forefront.
Kendra: I would say Australia and UK are like the two biggest ones…
Krista: And Canada obviously. We’re from North Dakota so we’re almost Canadian as it is. I just think it’s so cool with music that you can reach so many people without even physically being there. Now that we have all these new fans from across the world, I’m like, I need to go to here ASAP.
Those insights are going to plot your itinerary for you and I can’t wait for you to get over to the UK. Do you know what to expect from a UK audience?
Krista: I’ve heard from other artists, some of our friends that have gone, that they’re a listening crowd and they appreciate good quality music; vocals and songwriting. That’s what I’ve heard from UK fans.
Kendra: Yeah, that they actually like really listen to the lyrics and they almost appreciate music more than the average listener. Was it Miranda Lambert or Ashley McBryde? One of them was saying they love going to the UK because it’s this experience where you really feel like every person in the crowd is just listening to these songs…
Krista: …and they can hear a pin drop…
Kendra: …and they’re like, this is the best thing to ever happen. We’ve heard only great things about the UK audiences so we’re excited to hopefully experience that one day for sure.
That was probably Ashley because I remember her playing at C2C, the first time she performed there, and she did an acoustic version of “Girl Goin’ Nowhere”. The room was silent…
Kendra: I think it was her now that I think about it. We have some mutual friends and and she’s just amazing obviously, kudos to her for all she’s done. “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” I saw when she played that at the Opry for the first time and she got a standing ovation and everyone was just crying. Those moments you’re playing during a show with an acoustic guitar and everyone is listening to you, those are the really cool special moments that make people remember that.
Krista: I always feel like yes your music connects with fans, but when they can see who you are and your personality and you can tell like the story of why you wrote a song… when it’s me, Kendra and a guitar, there’s nothing to hide behind besides our voices and the song. We play with a live band, a high energy show, but at the core of it we still do a lot of acoustic shows. We’re very comfortable just being Kendra vocal, me harmony guitar… that is Tigirlily at the core of it. Build it up, strip it down, but that’s who it is.
We love the songwriting vibe at a show as we don’t get it very often…
Krista: We take it for granted over here. I forget that we’re in this little Nashville bubble and we’re around all these amazing musicians and artists all the time. Then it’s like, ‘oh, we need to share that with more people’. We get stuck in our little bubble here (laughs).
We mentioned The 615 House earlier and I was talking to Ashley Cooke about it recently. What’s your experience been like of being part of that?
Kendra: Yeah, so it actually started about this time last year. It was all these different artists, doing what we were doing on TikTok and people were kind of bored to be honest because we couldn’t play. We were like, ‘how can we still be creative?’ and so a lot of artists joined TikTok. Ashley Cooke and Chris Ruediger, two artists on TikTok, they cultivated this thing where they wanted to invite some friends to get together basically, in this house to be creative together, do covers and post fun content to cross promote each other. The TikTok app was what we were focusing on mainly. We got to go into this house and create together but I think the best part about it is, honestly, we have made so many good friendships out of that and so many great artists friendships. We’re all extremely supportive of one another. Honestly, after this last year I feel like everyone has just gotten so busy in the best way, which is amazing because that’s the whole goal. We’re all just in this group text message rooting each other on. It’s just like a hype thing now, where we get together when we can to still do content, but otherwise we’re just hyping each other up (laughs).
It’s working though with you guys signing to Monument and Priscilla to Universal. The impact of what you’re doing is obvious…
Krista: Yeah, I feel like everyone brought in their own little fan bases from TikTok and from Facebook and Instagram. It was a fun way to reintroduce ourselves to the TikTok world a little bit and obviously, people know us as Tigirlily but they’re also like, ‘you were part of that 615 House thing’. It’s really cool that we got to reach even new people with that. I feel like we’re all just helped each other out and we really just enjoyed being around each other and making really cool content because they’re all extremely talented people. We just enjoy those relationships now and now it’s more just like, ‘let’s just hang out and if content comes, it comes, but let’s hang out as friends’.
It’s such a rare thing. You wouldn’t get this community and support in any other genre of music. The 615 House is really paving the way for the next artists coming up…
Kendra: Oh, thank you. Artists aren’t necessarily friends with a lot of our artists all the time, and it’s not even on purpose, everyone’s so busy and just gets in their own thing, but to have a group of artist friends that genuinely want to support each other…
Krista: …and care and are all going through the same things.
Kendra: We’ll text each other, like, ‘hey, did you see this Instagram update? What’s going on here?’ and we’ll ask each other questions. I think everyone needs to have that sort of thing so if we’re setting the bar for that great because it’s honestly been so helpful and so nice to have that group of people. No one’s feeling competitive towards each other. It’s just genuinely, we’re all rooting each other on and we’re all so different and we’re all just doing our thing.
Krista: Hopefully we can set a precedent for other people to be like, ‘hey, let’s just all support each other because someone’s when isn’t another person’s loss’. It looks good for everyone. You want each other to do.
What else do you hope to achieve before Christmas rolls around?
Krista: I want to play the Opry!
Kendra: Yes, we do have the goal of playing the Opry whenever that happens we’ll be happy, obviously.
Krista: I’m like, ‘no, before this year ends!’
Kendra: Krista’s like we’ve got to do before the year ends. I’m like, ‘we’ll get there’. I think we’ve learned after this last year that whatever you plan probably isn’t going to happen and you just have to enjoy the journey and whatever comes your way, just be thankful for. Our favourite part of all this is playing live shows and connecting with fans. If we could jump on a tour somewhere or play the Opry or even start writing music for another project, after this EP releases July 9, that that would be the goals for me.
Krista: Same! (laughs)
Tigirlily release their self-titled EP on Friday 9th July 2021. Watch an acoustic version of ‘Dig Yourself’ below:
