This Friday, Tigirlily will release their debut self-titled EP. Ahead of the EP’s release, we interview the duo about their journey to Nashville and the story behind the tracks on the project. Pre-save the project here ahead of its release.
Hi guys, so good to speak to you today. I love hearing what you’ve been saying about collaborating in Nashville – it does feel like there’s an idea in the city about working together to be better together, rather than all being competitors?Â
Yeah, I feel like that’s where country music separates itself from other genres. Everyone in country music’s like, ‘we just want to hug each other and come together and collaborate.’ Even on social media, everyone just bigs each other up and it’s so nice to see, I’m glad we’re in this genre of music for that reason.Even though we do have each other, it’s nice to have other artist friends – it’s a big happy country music family.
Your career has just blown up over the past year, I know you’ve been working so hard in the industry for so many years, but people often don’t see that. It must be kind of strange, going to play live again and people know all your songs?
Super crazy, we’ve been doing music together for eight years, but we really felt like in this last year, we hit a breaking point – we’ve reached more people and now when we’re playing shows, people will show up and they’ll know all the words to ‘Somebody Does’ and ‘Dig Yourself.’ When we moved to Nashville, we’d been playing shows before that, but we started playing these cover gigs in Downtown Broadway, we played a lot at Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row. We played there three to four times a week before the pandemic. You know, you play ‘Before He Cheats’ by Carrie Underwood about 100 times. You don’t even have to think while you’re singing, because you’re singing that so many times. After this last year, when people show up and they’re singing our music, we have to close our eyes sometimes because we’ll just start crying. It’s the most rewarding thing, when we get requested to play our original music. They’re like, ‘I love you guys, please play one of your own songs’. That’s the best request.
When you’ve got newer artists, you think of them as overnight successes, but you don’t see the grafting in the industry for years. It’s so easy to just see how you’ve blown up over the past year and think it must have been so easy. I love that you have been working on honing that sound, and kind of know who you are already.
We were talking about with this with someone the other day. You think of Miranda Lambert or even Maren, but they put in years of work before they even got a record deal or broke through. It takes so many years, even though you think ‘oh, they’re an overnight success,’ but they played hundreds of shows. So, we played all these shows and we’ve been working for all this time. Then to get a break on TikTok last year, where it was just another avenue for us to be creative and to see people gravitating towards that – our social following has grown so much in the last year and it’s awesome, because we weren’t trying to do anything different. It’s not like we were on TikTok and thinking ‘let’s try to be something completely different than what we’ve done’. We were doing the same thing and singing the same way. People were like, ‘Oh, we really like this. Let’s follow them’. We talked about how many shows you’d have to do to reach 500,000 fans, it’s insane. So obviously live shows are our favourite part of what we do, but through social media you can reach so many people.
Over this past year, we’ve all thought ‘what do we do?’ It’s been nice knowing that you’re making the best out of it and reaching this fan base. It was totally a silver lining. To be fairly honest, we were like, ‘this is probably going to be the worst year of our career yet’ when the pandemic hit, because we basically make all of our money live. When that was taken away, it was really a shock to our systems like, ‘well, what are we going to do?’ When everything was worse than everyone anticipated, we thought we’d have to be creative. Otherwise, mentally, we’re just going to bored out of our minds. Then, we released ‘Somebody Does’ and that going viral and then signing with Monument, we both learned that timing is everything. You have to keep working and just stick to what you do and really focus on that. Good things will happen when you least expect them.
Talking about how long you’ve been working for, I think that shows in the strength of these five songs. You can listen through to them and know who ‘Tigirlily’ are.
Yeah, we started Tigirlily when we were 14 and 16. We’ve released indie music in the past, I’m so glad that when we formally get to introduce ourselves with this EP, there’s no doubt that this is who we are, this is our sound. We’ve taken eight years to figure it out, so we’re ready to go. We’re not just experimenting at this point, throwing stuff out and wondering if people will like this. This is who we are, we live or die by it. We’re just happy that we can reintroduce ourselves to a lot of new people with the EP.
You look through your list of songs and it’s so strong. You’ve got such strong co-writers on there. What does it mean to have the support of Shane MacAnally?
He’s an iconic songwriters and we were such fans when we moved to Nashville, it was always on our bucket list to write with Shane Macanally one day. Â When we got introduced to him and he was like, ‘Oh, I love y’all and your music’ and he wanted to produce us – he even wrote ‘Dig Yourself’ with us. It still feels weird to say that he produced us and he’ll put stuff on his story sometimes and we’re like ‘what? This can’t be right.’
What did he bring to your sound and bring out of you guys?
We were really interested in working with him because, Â when we would play, he wanted to hear everything acoustically, he wanted to hear us sing with just the guitar and nothing else. We would play these songs for him and then we would get into the studio and it was all live band. He said, ‘I have this vision of y’all being like The Chicks, with the energy of this live band.’ He wanted to hone in on the harmonies and the vocals and bring that energy out. He was always like ‘Kendra, you have so much personality in your voice, let’s bring that out.’ He really doesn’t try to change you. He takes the best parts of what you do and he amplifies that.
Well your harmonies are so strong and tight. You don’t want those to be drowned underneath too much production, but still have a fresh sound.
Yeah, it’s live band, but it’s also fresh. We play with a five-piece band – we have electric bass and drums and that’s pretty much our normal touring band. We want people to listen to the track, and when they come see us live, it’s all instruments that we can play in the same way. You’re gonna get what you hear on that record and it was an unbelievable time working with Shane Macanally. He made us feel so comfortable and is truly a genius. He truly brought out the best in this EP.
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You’ve also written a lot with Walker Hayes on the project. ‘My Thang’ was just such a fun track. Can you talk about writing that song with him and the genesis of that song?
‘My Thang’ was actually the first time we had met Walker. He asked us, ‘what’s your story?’ So, Krista was explaining to him that we’d basically been playing for eight years, doing our thing and. He was like ‘okay we’re writing that.’ It really just came out very naturally. There’s another song on the EP called, ‘Everybody’s On Something’ and it’s probably my favourite track. We’ve never released a song like that before and I don’t think people are going to expect that from us. I’m very excited for people to hear that one and I think that’s the type of song that everyone can relate to in a different way. Everybody has their something that they know is bad for them, but they still want and that’s basically what the whole song is about. We love writing with Walker, because if you’ve listened to his music, he’s not a cookie cutter. He’s trying to do all these fun things, his new song ‘Fancy Like’ is blowing up and it has the word ‘Applebee’s’ in it – I would have never thought about putting that in a song. So, we’re big fans of him, but it’s just been really fun to write with him, Shane and Louis Newman also co-produced that. They bring out the best of us, like Walker. He’ll challenge us on stuff and he sits on a line and he doesn’t just write it to write it and then we’re done. He focuses on every part of the song, which we love, because he’s taking care of them like his kids.
Since you’ve moved to Nashville, do you find that your songwriting has changed?Â
I think we’ve just grown as songwriters and I think sometimes when we would write, we’d write to ‘be cool’ or write what we thought people wanted to hear. We now know that they want to hear real songwriting – all people want to hear is something real, which is a lot of pressure off of us honestly, to just write what we’re going through and stuff that’s real to us. At the end of the day, if you don’t relate to it, or if your fans can tell that you don’t relate to it in a way, you don’t put it out. It’s important to relate to the songs.
Going back, when did you guys decide to pursue music full-time and make the move to Nashville?
I don’t remember a time where it switched. It was always something that we loved performing, it just was natural to us. When we started putting covers on YouTube or playing at local events and people started gravitating towards them, we were like ‘Okay, this is cool.’ It just started growing and growing, and we found out we can make money off of our music. It was weird, because we didn’t grow up in a musical family. They were always super supportive. We just love doing it and making a living off this, there’s no turning back, we have to make this work as a career.
How ever many years down the line, you’re signed to Monument and you have the EP coming out – so it’s worked out pretty well!
It’s crazy, it’s weird to reflect on the last eight years, we put in all this hard work. This is a new chapter to where everything has levelled up and we’re just excited to reach new people with our music, everything is just going really well and we’re thankful.Â
Well we’re excited for when things lift to get you back to the UK!
We want to get over to the UK so bad. We’ve never been and I think it would be just the most incredible experience. We’ve been told so many times how amazing the UK fans are and how much they listen to the songs and how invested they are in the music.
With the EP coming out, do you have a plan for what’s going to follow it? Do you think that it will lead into a full length album at some point?
I mean, we’re always writing for new music and we’re so focused on this EP and these five songs to where we don’t know if it’s gonna be a full album eventually, or a new EP or just more singles. We don’t know what’s the bigger picture yet. Obviously we would love to have a full album out eventually. We are always working on new music and this will not be the last.
That’s exactly what we want to hear. As I said, the five songs are just so strong and I just can’t wait to see what you guys do.
Thank you.
Thanks for chatting today.
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