Tigirlily talk to Ty Bentli on Apple Music Country, pulling back the curtain on the birth of the band – from their signing announcement to the creation of their debut single and more, revealing more about the inner workings of Nashville.
Shane McAnally on why he signed Tigirlily to Monument Records: “They are just unique. Although Tigirlily has made a splash on iTunes all of a sudden and of course they’re TikTok stars, and the thing is their music is still different. And their voices especially have a thing that the harmony aspect when we’re writing or in the studio working, they’ll just instantly be in harmony. I mean, it’s like they are singing the first time in perfect harmony without learning. It is, it’s instinct. And it just, it’s definitely in their blood.”
Shane McAnally on his journey to get where he is today: “I get chills. You asking me that question, I get a little teary-eyed. I am emotional about that because lately I’ve just been in a place of gratitude. I’ve kept my head down for the last 10 years and just am so grateful because for 16 years I was in Nashville and could not get arrested. I could get arrested, but no, for me, there was a moment of sort of breathing out and it happened in 2009. I was working in a restaurant in Nashville. I had been living in LA, but I’d moved back to Nashville, which again, at that point, my trajectory of coming to Nashville, I had been in town 15 years, sort of in Nashville then to LA then back.
Shane McAnally on the obstacles he faced: “I was never homeless on the streets, but the house that I owned, I lost in the great crash of 2008 and my car got repossessed and it was down. I mean, I was down and I was just like, what am I doing? You know, I’ve had two record deals. I’ve had multiple publishing deals. Am I on the wrong path? It was like I would pray that God would give me a different passion. And what happened is, I mean, at the end of my rope, I wrote a song called Last Call that Leanne Womack recorded. And Leanne Womack had always been, for the whole decade before, had been my muse. I didn’t know her, but she was absolutely and is still, my absolute favorite singer. And when she recorded Last Call and they said it was going to be a single, there was just a moment where I call it like a whisper, and it was, it’s going to be okay. What happened not too long after that, was Kenny Chesney recorded Somewhere With You.”
Tigirlily on getting their record deal: “Yeah, it’s pretty surreal. We’ve been doing Tigirlily for eight years now together, and you always have these monumental goals; I like to say that now. That’s just something you always dream of and then you move to Nashville and you’re like, “Can I do this? Am I good enough?” So when we got to Nashville, we really just dove into our lane, and we started playing as many shows as we could when we got to town and going to college and writing. To have that deal offered to us was like… This is our dream team. This is totally a dream come true, and they can come true.”
Tigirlily on “Somebody Does”: “As everyone knows, this last year has just been heavy and upsetting, and there was so much anger in the world. Obviously, we love writing love, breakup songs, fun songs, party songs, all those, but we’re like, “I can’t do that today, honestly.” So our co-writer, Zarni, she’s like, “What would you even… If you had one chance, what would you say to the world?” We’re like, “Okay, let’s do this.” We kept coming back to the line, “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but somebody does.” The song poured out in two hours. We just laid down a little bit of an acoustic work tape to it.”
