Conversations with Tigirlily Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tigirlily Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh.

Hi Tigirlily, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
We are sisters and grew up singing together in small-town ND. Krista started writing songs and playing guitar at the age of ten and at about the same time, I (Kendra) started competing in local singing competitions and talent shows. At 14 and 16, we officially joined forces and became “Tigirlily.” We threw ourselves into playing every country fair and school around the ND/Midwest area while sharing original music and covers on YouTube. By the time Krista had graduated high school, we had made several trips to Nashville and knew we wanted to take a leap of faith and move down to Nashville to follow our dream. In Aug. of 2017, we left everything we knew and dove headfirst into Nashville by playing 3-4 times a week downtown, writing hundreds of songs, and going to college full time at Belmont University. Recently, we signed a record deal with Monument Records, a division of Sony and have been releasing lots of new music. In February of 2021, our song “Somebody Does” went completely viral and ended up going #1 all genres. Since then, we’ve released two more tracks, “My Thang” and “Dig Yourself” along with our debut self-titled EP coming July 9th.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
We’ve always had the mindset to just keep going no matter what. It’s a really great thing to have each other to lean on through the ups and downs of this journey. Of course, there have been struggles along the way and moments where we had no idea what we were doing or when we were frustrated with the fact that we weren’t further along in our career. What we’ve realized through it all is that every challenge and time of frustration has taught us a lesson or motivated us more. If everything was smooth and easy all the time, you’d never learn! I think the hardest part about this career is comparing your career to others around you, and we’ve found the more we just focused on what we were doing and what we could do to be better at our craft, the better the outcome was.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are a sister country-music duo, called “Tigirlily” – (TiGIRLily)

Story behind our name: The first wildflower to grow in our parents’ flower garden in ND was a Tigerlilly! We changed the spelling to TiGIRLily to add some girl power. Also, I (Kendra) have more of the Lily personality and style (girly, bubbly) while Krista has more “Tigir” energy (fierce, determined). We chose the name at 14 and 16, and it’s stuck with us to this day!

Our sound/specialty: Think of a modern day “The Chicks” attitude with angelic sibling harmony. Our specialty is definitely our sibling harmony and high-energy live performances.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
One of our favorite childhood music memories is recording YouTube videos in our kitchen back home in North Dakota. We’d call them ‘kitchen covers” and people really gravitated towards them. We still record covers and originals in our kitchen in Nashville – they just go up on TikTok now. There’s something really magical about singing our favorite songs together in a place we call home without any mics or reverb – just the kitchen.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://www.tigirlily.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tigirlily/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tigirlily
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tigirlily?lang=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/tigirlily
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@tigirlily?lang=en

Image Credits
Jared Olson Photography