- Fight Like A Girl CD from Bombshel - Courtesy of Webster & Associates
There’s Sugarland, Montgomery Gentry and, of course, Brooks & Dunn on the landscape of contemporary country duos. But when it comes to a female-only lineup, beyond the now-disbanded mom-daughter act The Judds, the lone queens to the throne are Bombshel.
Composed of fiddle player Kristy Osmunson, and lead singer Kelley Shepard, who first met when both were performing at a multi-artist event in Michigan, Bombshel experienced its greatest commercial breakthrough to date in 2009, thanks to the players’ Fight Like A Girl single from their freshman album of the same name that was released Oct. 20, 2009.
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Climbing as high as No. 30 on the U.S. country charts, the Fight Like A Girl track was inspired by a young woman with cancer whom Kelley met through Kristy when the pair played a benefit show in Idaho. Pregnant with her first child, the woman ultimately died from the disease just after her daughter’s eighth birthday, but not before forever touching both Kelley and Kristy with her strength in the face of a daunting adversary.
“I really wanted to gear it towards all women,” says Kelley in the act’s artist biography, regarding how the duo crafted their Fight Like A Girl song. “With our moms, sisters and grandmas … I’ve always really admired their persistence through the tough times. I think women have an amazing ability to endure. It’s a positive thing to fight like a girl, because girls are a lot stronger on the inside.
“We don’t want to put one meaning on this song,” she continued. “We want people to take it however they want to take it—whether they are a little girl or a woman struggling with something they really can’t control. We don’t want it to just be the ‘cancer song’ because everyone has their own story.”
Country Songs on New CD Reflect Singers' Real Lives
Now based in Nashville, where they share a house, the Bomshel players said that when it came time to create music for their current Curb Records CD—including their latest single, the No. 39-ranked 19 and Crazy—they wanted to share stories that came from real life, be it their own lives or those around them.
“It has to be something that we’re really organically going through or a conversation that we’ve had with a fan or friend,” Kristy said in the duo’s artist bio.
Indeed, agreed Kelley, “Kristy and I are about as normal as it comes, so if it happens to us, it pretty much happens to everybody,”
On the pair’s 11-song Fight Like A Girl album, Arizona is a favorite track of Kelley’s.
“We wrote that with Jack Sizemore,” she recalled. “He asked me where I was from and I said, ‘Back in Arizona,’ He said, ‘That’s a great title,’ so we just wrote it. I wanted to put things that were really very Arizona and things that people in Arizona would know and recognize. We wrote that song in a half-hour.”
Canoe, too, is a track inspired from Kelley’s real life; specifically, the first date she had with her now-boyfriend. At the time, she has said, she’d never been on the lake before and she was doing her best to get simply get in the canoe without being “prissy” about it.
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Although the roommates-turned-recording duo are the first to concede they are opposites in most every way, somehow, when it comes to creating music together, the result is real and authentic, making them partners in rhyme who make it work. Both, nonetheless, grew up loving the country sound and performing from the get-go.
“When I was 6 years old, I’ll never forget watching a Reba McEntire concert,” Kelley recalled via Bombshel’s bio.“She had costume changes and danced. I thought it was so amazing. She put on this energetic show, but then she could simply stand still in the middle of the stage in that beautiful red dress and sing the crap out of a song. I loved it. I wanted to do that. …”
With influences from Garth Brooks to the late Chris LeDoux, Kristy, meanwhile, can trace her performing origins back to the ripe old age of 4, when she began playing with a group called Fiddler’s Hatchery.
“It was a really intense musical experience, because we did summer camps and we toured through the U.S and Canada in the summer doing these big shows,” she shared via the duo’s bio. “It was a lot of fun. We got to play these really neat theaters and we did barn dances and all sorts of fun stuff.”
Songwriting Partners Create Hit-Country Music on Fight Like A Girl CD
Once Kelley and Kristy teamed in late 2007, however, pursuing success as a team turned out to be a career move that was both natural and empowering; thus, Bombshel—which was first founded in 2004—was reborn. Moreover, today, with a few years on the road under their collective belt, the women have secured added confidence in their songwriting and live show.
Citing her Bombshel experiences as nothing short of an amazing “journey of self discovery,” Kristy said that when fans spin a copy of the duo’s current album, it’s 100 percent Kelley and Kristy, for better or for worse.
“Every song you hear it’s going to be us,” Kelley affirmed. “You’ll hear our fun side and our sad side. We have some really traditional country on there and some really poppy stuff.”
“All I can say is on this record I played as good as I could have possibly played,” Kristy confirmed. “I sang as good as I could have possibly sung and Kelly sang as good as she could. It’s a scary experience to now be putting it out there because it’s definitely a piece of our soul.”
Lisa L. Rollins - Texas native Lisa L. Rollins, Ph.D., is an award-winning feature writer, interviewer and journalism educator.
