Originally from North Dakota, Tigirlily Gold formed in high school before moving to Nashville and taking up a weekly residency at Dierks Bentley’s bar Whiskey Row. All those hard yards and that hard work is finally paying off now because what a 9 months it has been for Tigirlily Gold! Since the slight tweak to their name last October, sister duo Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh, have been at the centre of a whirlwind! Trips to the UK for the C2C festival, Opry debuts, CMAFest appearances and their song ‘Shoot Tequila’ gaining traction and climbing the charts too. And here they are now, poised to release new EP ‘Blonde’ on Friday (June 23rd). We were thrilled to catch up with them to talk all about it.
Thank you for your time today. I know you are both very busy because it’s release week! Are you doing anything special to mark the occasion?
Kendra: We are so excited! We actually have a show in Montana on Friday which is close to where our grandparents are from and where our mom grew up so it’s kind of like a little ‘home’ show in a way so it will be fun to celebrate with some people that we know and make some new friends too.
I only know Montana through the Yellowstone TV show, so please take care! (laughing)
Krista: (laughing) We’re not in the Yellowstone half, we’re a little bit more, like, Great Plains, you know? There’s not a lot of people so I don’t think we’ll run into any Yellowstone trouble up there!
It looked like you had a fantastic CMAFest. Did you have to pinch yourself a few times over the weekend?
Krista: Oh my gosh, yes! We had played the same stage last year and from last year to this year, to see the growth in terms of how many people knew our music and the fact that so many people came from all over to CMAFest and then they came and watched us play was awesome. We also hosted our first fan party too so we got to share some music with them and give them access to new merch. We are super grateful to be able to give back to our fans and CMAFest is all about that.
The past 9 months have been crazy for you guys. Since the name change you’ve had so much going on, from ‘Shoot Tequila’ hitting the charts, to international trips to Opry debuts. Is the time passing in a blur or are you managing to enjoy parts of it?
Kendra: We should have changed our name a long time ago because I think the ‘Gold’ might have brought us some luck! (laughing) We are trying to stop as much as we can and soak it all in, enjoy it. This has been a journey 10 years in the making now and we can finally feel, this year, that breakthrough happening.
Were you nervous stepping into that circle at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time?
Both: YES! Oh my gosh.
Krista: Nervous is an understatement! You are just so grateful and honoured to be there and be invited to play that stage where all the legends and all the people you’ve looked up to in Country music have played. You want to do it justice and you want to respect that stage and we were very clear that we wanted to leave a positive impact on the stage, it was one of the best nights of our lives.
Kendra: We got to go back and play it again last week which was almost nicer because we didn’t have so many nerves this time around.
Krista: We knew we wanted to do one song with the Opry band and then one song acoustic. ‘Shoot Tequila’ is our biggest song so that was a kind of obvious choice but then we wanted to play a song that would leave an emotional impact so we played a song that isn’t even out yet called ‘I Tried a Ring On.’ It’s not on the EP but it will be coming out later in the year.
You guys have put in the hard yards over the last decade. Did you have a favourite place to play on Broadway when you were doing those four hour cover sets in Nashville? How has all that time spent playing shows evolved you as performers and songwriters?
Kendra: Our favourite place to play was Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row. We played there for two years, three or four nights a week. It was a very artist friendly place to play. We played a four hour covers set but we could squeeze in an original every hour or so. We managed to build up some genuine fans there and playing that way. When you have to learn 60 to 100 songs to know at all times and be able to play on request that is going to expand your songwriting ability in terms of chord structures and using different melodies. It definitely encouraged us to be better songwriters. ‘Shoot Tequila’ was inspired by playing down on Broadway when you see the impact of songs like ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’ or ‘Friends in Low Places’ – you don’t even have to be a Country music fan to like those songs, right? We wanted to have those same vibes in ‘Shoot Tequila’.
Who came up with the ‘Shake-Shake Shakira hips’ line in that song?
Krista: Me! (laughing) We write all our songs together. Kendra had the title for the song and we wanted to it to be a fun song, witty even, you know? We wanted to get a bit of Brad Paisley style wit in there, I feel like Country is missing that a little bit right now. I’m usually very shameless in the writing room and will often just blurt our anything to see how it sounds. So, I was, like, what about using the line ‘Shakira hips’?, you know, ‘shake Shakira hips’, thinking it was stupid and everyone in the room thought it needed to go in the song. Everyone knows what you are talking about when you say Shakira hips………..
Kendra: We don’t have Shakira hips…
Krista: We do not! (laughing)
Kendra: But when you have a little too much tequila you think you do have Shakira hips, right? (laughing)
You are right when you say that a little of the humour has gone out of Country music right now. It’s all very serious and a bit intense. That’s why songs like ‘Shoot Tequila’ and ‘Blonde’ feel both classic and yet a breath of fresh air at the same time.
Kendra: Thank you. We are really trying to bring that ‘girl group’, fun energy to Country music. Hopefully it’s a need people are looking for right now.
Krista: It’s that ‘blonde’, ‘Dolly Parton state of mind’. If you know anything about Dolly, she’s not afraid to poke fun at herself, she is the ultimate breath of fresh air for me. We wanted to channel that energy a little bit and be live music focused. High energy was something that we kept in mind when writing for the record.
To pivot away from the light-hearted songs a little, ‘Hometown Song’ is a very clever, very intelligent look at how you can be conflicted about your hometown, in a genre that often eulogises hometowns or paints a sheen of nostalgia over what can be some very tricky emotions.
Kendra: I feel like we’ve been writing songs about our hometown for years now but we never found one that felt extremely true to us and how we feel. In Country music there’s so many songs about hometowns, whether people love them and see nothing wrong or can’t wait to leave. We couldn’t relate to either of those feelings.
Krista: I kinda feel like we had forced hometown songs to be too happy in the past.
Kendra: We wanted to capture that feeling of never wanting to change where you grew up, because that’s how we feel, but also wanting to see the world. It’s that push and pull feeling that we wanted to write about. We loved our hometown but we also wanted to leave and discover other things too. Nothing can replace that feeling of ‘home’ but your home is not always the best feeling either.
Krista: We wanted to do it right because it can be a very delicate subject. We didn’t want to sound bitter in any way and I’m very grateful that the co-writers we took it to (Alex Kline and Scott Stepakoff) wanted to help us tell our story and get the balance right.
Krista: The folks back home in North Dakota have been incredibly supportive of us and our careers and at every show there is always someone from North Dakota there! They pop up everywhere! (laughing) It’s really cool to see people who have been there since day 1 for us come to shows still.
The EP is completed by ‘Move On’ which is a really funky song. I can hear a kind of Maren Morris influence on that song. Is she an artist who influences you at all?
Krista: Oh my gosh. I LOVE her records. That debut album, with ‘My Church’ and ’80s Mercedes’? Even ‘Drunk Girls Don’t Cry’. She definitely was a breath of fresh air in Country music. ‘Move On’ is kinda like that ‘girl power’ music you want to listen to when you are getting ready to go out on a Friday night. It’s a funky, sultry kind of song.
Krista: The whole EP is about confidence. Being bold and confident in who you are and what you want. It’s 2023, if a woman wants to make the first move on a guy, why shouldn’t she? Go for it. That’s how we introduce ‘Move On’ when we play it live. It’s great to bring a bit of a female perspective to a sultry Country music song.
Alex Kline and Scott Stepakoff have co-written 3 of the 4 songs on the EP. Are they your go-to writing team?
Kendra: They are definitely up there out of the 10 people I could name on my hands right now. If we have an idea that we feel very protective over, we’ll probably take it to Alex and Scott. I trust them. When you find people that you create really well with and that you trust, you have to stick with them, right? If we have a good idea that we don’t want to risk with new people, we’ll call up Alex and Scott.
If you could sit down with anyone in Nashville tomorrow and write your next single, who would you choose and why?
Krista: We have worked with Shane McAnally before, when we wrote ‘Dig Yourself’ for the last EP, so I’d like to get on a room with Shane and Josh Osborne again, 100%.
Kendra: I’d love to write with Natalie Hemby, I love her writing style, she’s amazing.
Do you have fond memories of your trip over to the UK in March for the C2C festival?
Krista: Oh yeah!
Kendra: We’ll never forget it. We came in hot because we’d kinda been booked at the last minute thanks to the success of ‘Shoot Tequila’. London is one of our top streaming cities, which is so cool. I remember getting out of our cab and somebody shouted ‘Tigirlily Gold, Shoot Tequila’ and I was, like, ‘this is crazy, how do they know us here!’ (laughing)
Krista: We had been told by other artists, like Ashley McBryde, how good the fans there were in terms of how attentive you are and how much attention you pay to the lyrics and we definitely saw that. We were told that when we played in the shopping area, it was the most people that had ever been to that stage before, which was so cool.
Kendra: To have people in another country know the words to your songs is something very special to me. We are itching to get back.
The natural progression is onto the Spotlight stage in the main arena next year then, in between all the main stage acts.
Krista: Yes! That’s the goal!
Kendra: If you have any strings you can pull we would definitely appreciate that very much! (laughing)
Whats the plan for the rest of the year?
Kendra: This EP is just a teaser for all the music yet to come. There is a full record coming but we wanted to give these four songs an opportunity to live first. Touring. Shows. New Music and hopefully getting back to the UK as soon as possible.
Tigirlily Gold’s new EP ‘Blonde’ is out on Friday 23rd June – go check it out and watch out for a review of it on release day too.
