A debut album, a shiny new ACM award, regular Grand Ole Opry appearances, larger crowds: It’s all next-level career stuff these days for Kendra and Krista Slaubaugh, aka Tigirlily Gold. But none of it is rocking their world like the change the sisters are about to make.
Kendra, 28, drops the bombshell about Krista, 26: “She’s getting her own place.”
How big a deal is this? Except for the one brief semester Kendra went away to college, the sisters have never lived apart. And even given all their recent accomplishments, they know this is going to have a much deeper impact on their lives.
But make no mistake: Sisterhood is still powerful.
“Forever and always, our sisterhood is the most important thing to us — and our love for each other,” says Kendra. “And that always comes first. We love making music together. We love creating. That will never stop. But at the root of it, we’re sisters.”
That bond, the sisters have discovered over their 14 years as a formal duo (of course they have always sung songs together), is also at the heart of their music. No doubt it’s the sound that emanates from their newly released album, Blonde: two strong and sassy female voices navigating life and love on the current of their own blood harmony.
Jared Olson
It’s been a journey, says Krista, to lock in that sound — to find that sisterhood in their songs. Both agree that they arrived at their destination in 2021 when they wrote title track “Blonde,” an irreverent pledge of allegiance to peroxide dependence and a “Dolly Parton state of mind.”
“We’ve since pinpointed it as girl group energy,” says Krista. “It’s all the things we’ve been saying, with the confidence and the fun. There’s something about when women come together and make music. It just makes you feel unstoppable. We don’t filter because we try to keep it real. So I think when we stopped trying to be …”
“ … cool,” says Kendra (because finishing a thought is second-nature to these sisters).
“ … too artsy and cool,” Krista seamlessly continues, “and stopped writing what we thought people wanted from us, and we just wrote what we actually enjoyed and what we had unique to say, that’s when it clicked for us. And that was ‘Blonde.’”
“Blonde” video
Rightly, the song is the first of the album’s 10 tracks, which also include their two splash-making radio singles, “Shoot Tequila” and “I Tried a Ring On,” their current chart-climber. Eight of the songs are sisterly co-writes, and they exude the women’s backstory, from “Hometown Song,” a nod to their growing-up years in tiny Hazen, North Dakota, to the sultry, sexy “End Up Us,” which evokes Kendra’s five-year marriage to childhood sweetheart Jared Olson, now a Nashville photographer.
“Bleeding Love,” Leona Lewis’ 2007 pop megahit, is the album’s only cover, and it actually harks back to the Slaubaughs’ dues-paying years in Nashville, when they played grueling four-hour sets of covers in Lower Broadway’s honky-tonks.
“We just got bored playing the same songs over and over, so we whipped up our country version of ‘Bleeding Love,’” explains Krista. “It was a song that, no matter what audience we played it to, they would light up and just all start singing at the top of their lungs. When we stopped playing on Broadway, we always kept it in our live set.”
Album producer Shane McAnally was the one who suggested it as the final song on the album.
Other project standouts have been inspired, for better or worse, by Krista’s romantic misadventures, including “Stupid Prizes,” a built-for-live-performance anthem that, as Krista says, “Kendra can wail on.” The regretful “I Tried a Ring On” also mirrors Krista’s breakup experiences, though the song didn’t start out that way when they wrote it two years ago with Nashville songwriters Pete Good and Josh Jenkins.
“I was in a relationship at the time, and when we wrote the song, I pictured what I would feel like if we split,” Krista recalls. “Then fast-forward a couple of months, and we did end up breaking up. At first it was just something that I hoped I would never have to go through, and then it was something that I was going through.”
No worries: She’s since gotten the last laugh. Not only did the duo deliver a triumphant performance of the song on this year’s ACM awards show after they were named new duo/group of the year, but Krista also is now happily dating fellow country artist Walker Montgomery, the son of 1990s hit-maker John Michael Montgomery and nephew of Montgomery Gentry’s Eddie Montgomery.
The two young artists met after a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend told the sisters’ mother that Montgomery might have a long-distance crush on Krista. “It’s a true story!” Kendra interjects as Krista tells the tale. She made the logical next move and slid into Montgomery’s DMs. They had their first date (adorably playing miniature golf) in December, and they made their first public appearance together in May on the ACM awards red carpet.
“I Tried a Ring On” video
Sharing the same career, says Krista, has been an unexpected bonus in the relationship. “I actually really like it because we’re gone at the same time,” she says about their respective touring schedules. “He understands what I do. We’re both very supportive of each other. We’re not competitive with each other. We care so much about music, and it’s our passion. But we very much have lives outside of music, and our relationship is very based on that. We love each other a lot, and we also love music.”
Crucially, Kendra approves of the match. “I am the harshest critic, probably even more than my parents,” she assures. “He treats her so, so great, and he just dotes over her. It’s just the sweetest thing to see. They both deserve each other, and they both make each other very happy, and I love seeing that.”
Krista reaffirms her current state of bliss with a wide grin: “All good things here. Album. Boyfriend.”
She can add to that list Tigirlily Gold’s dozen Opry appearances (and counting) since their debut in May 2023, a high-profile appearance on a recent Dolly Parton TV special, opening slots for Parker McCollum‘s and label-mate Walker Hayes’ arena tours, and even an Instagram shoutout from one-half of country’s most famous female duo, Wynonna Judd: “Carry the torch, girls!”
Someday soon the sisters will both be receiving another happy thing: their ACM trophies. The stand-in trophy placed in their hands in May was soon whisked away, but everything else about their ACM experience turned it into “the best week of our lives,” says Krista. “That award made everything worth it. All the work we put in, all the nights of going, what are we doing?”
Adds Kendra: “And to know the country music industry is behind us and supporting us and rooting us on and believing in what we’re doing, it’s just a lot of validation.”
When the real hardware is delivered, says Kendra, “it will be like winning the award all over again.”
This time, in plural form: Both sisters quickly checked with ACM officials to make sure each would be receiving her own trophy.
“We’ve had to share closets and share bathrooms in our lifetime,” says Kendra, “but we do not have to share our ACM awards!”
That’s no small matter, since the sisters will soon be at two different addresses. They’re making their moves to separate quarters within the next couple of weeks — just one more sign of their rising success since their living arrangement, if anything, had been a money-saving measure. Kendra and her husband have now been able to afford a home purchase, and Krista took that as her signal to finally get her own place.
“We’ll be a half-hour apart from each other,” Kendra shares.
“So we’ll have a little bit of separation … ,” Krista says.
“… It might be good for us … ,” Kendra interjects.
“… which is probably good,” says Krista, repeating her sister as she finishes her own thought.
Jared Olson
Kendra elaborates on the expected benefits of two households: “When we’re together, it’s really hard for us to turn off music, so it might be nice for us to have a little bit of personal lives outside of music.”
But it probably bears repeating: Sisterhood is still powerful.
The Slaubaughs note that, even when they’re off the road, they still plan to see each other every day. And even when they’re apart, they’ll never really be that far away. As Kendra says, with some measure of sisterly relief: “Thank goodness for FaceTime.”
