Husband And Wife Duo The Mizes Offer a Candid and Humorous Look at Marriage Through Debut EP

Kansas native Logan Mize and his wife Jill Martin join forces on their debut EP The Mizes.

Throughout the project, the couple innocuously sings about the reality of getting married and building a life together. They reference everything that coincides with matrimony, including love, sadness, happiness, and even taxes. 

Martin showcases her sweet and divine voice throughout the EP, while Logan, her other half, presents his smooth, yet powerful voice. Together the duo creates a lively, fun-loving track list for their listeners to relate and jam out to. 

“We hope you can relate and we can’t wait to play these songs for you live,” the duo shared upon the release of the six-song set. 

Country Now recently caught up with The Mizes to chat about their newest project and their plans for the future. Check out our exclusive Q&A below.

I know that you have known each other for a very long time and even participated in co-writes together, so why did you wait until now to create an EP together? Why this particular timing?

Jill: We have co-written a couple of songs on Logan’s projects and then I guess every song on both of my projects we wrote together. I don’t know why we waited so long, but when we started writing for this project it felt like the songs just fell out. It made sense that we were doing this now because we have a lot to say. We’ve been married 13 years and our kids are older, so I’ve had more free time as far as being able to write. 

Logan: We had kids really early, so when we were first married we only had a year. At that point, I had just signed my first publishing deal as a solo artist, so I pursued that path. Then we had kids and she stayed home while I was in a van crisscrossing the country for what felt like a decade. We live in a smaller town, the kids are in school now, and we finally have time to write together. It made it a lot easier than trying to change diapers and write songs at the same time. 

Jill: We have tried to write duets before and we wouldn’t finish them. Then when this project came, everything just fell out. 

Logan: We wrote it pretty fast.  The songs were all of her ideas. They were all her titles and we knew we wanted to make it funny and quirky. I like it that way because I can kind of just come in and be like ‘that one should sound like this.’ We made a good team as far as that went. I would just start playing after she said a title and then she would start riffing off of that. 

Jill: I will say that every time I come to a show of Logan’s, and we sing a Conway and Loretta song, his fans come up to us afterward and ask why we don’t do duets more. I feel like that definitely put the idea in our heads. We thought that people really liked seeing us do these songs together, so we figured maybe we should. 

What was your favorite part about creating this project together as a married couple? 

Jill: We don’t have a lot of similar hobbies except music. Logan is definitely an adventurous person who wants to hike and travel. I like being home more. I talk a lot, but I mean this project is something that we both like doing together. We really get along well when we are doing this together because we enjoy doing it. 

What do you hope the listeners will take away from these six songs?

Jill: I would hope that if they are married and they listen to it, they see that it is normal to have bad days and it’s okay to make fun of it. I hate when everyone tries to act so perfect all the time. 

Logan: Especially in a social media culture where everyone posts their highlight reel. I feel like the songs make it okay for you to have bad days and tough years. It’s not perfect and it’s work more than anything. You have this initial part where it’s all fun, and you have these big dreams, and you think you’re going to live this perfect life, but it turns out that you really have to work for it every day. I hope that gives a little bit of realism to the whole idea of being married and having a family.

Jill: I like how we ended it with “Look What Our Love Made” because it ties it all up. All jokes aside and all hard times aside, we are super grateful for this life that we have. 

I’ve been following your Instagram accounts and I know that you guys have been filming music videos for the EP. Can you tell me how you decided on the video locations and where they are. 

Jill: We were supposed to shoot the whole album cover and a bunch of video content in Tulsa. A girl from my hometown in Andale, named Sydney Davidson, lives in Tulsa, so we were going to go down there. They had those big storms and the entire town was out of power for days, so the day before we were going to shoot, we had to re-evaluate. We just found things around where we are from in Sedgwick County. His aunt had told me about this place in Cheney that had the little chapel and that Western feeling. We also used our garage for some stuff. We had the whole thing planned out in Tulsa.

Logan: We also used Cowtown in Wichita. It was great because we didn’t have to drive anywhere. 

Jill: We like our bubble.  

I noticed there was a little bit of acting involved in the music videos. Would you say you are both natural actors or is there one of you that is better than the other? 

Jill: I definitely think Logan was more in his element.

Logan: I definitely love that and I like the lighter side of things. I’m kind of a big dude and I think sometimes when I’m out playing shows and focusing on playing, I forget to smile. It comes across as abrasive, so it’s fun for me to be able to be fun, lighthearted, and stupid. The acting thing is way easier for me than the performing part. Jill is kind of the opposite. 

Jill: I’ve been helping with Logan’s videos for a while now and I definitely like being behind the camera. I love the singing part, but when it comes down to it, I’d really rather be on the other side of the camera telling him what to do. 

Logan: I enjoy being on camera. It’s fun. 

In one of the music videos, you (Jill) smashed a beer bottle over Logan’s head. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Jill: They’re made of sugar and I had no clue how hard I needed to hit him. Everyone said that I wound up bigger than a major league baseball player. When I hit him, he started bleeding, so my reaction is a genuine reaction. I was like ‘oh shit. I really drilled him.’ I mean if you just barely tapped the bottles they’d shatter, but I didn’t know that.

Logan: She really got me good.

Jill: It was definitely fun. 

Why did you decide to release “Hitched Up” and “Love’s The Only Thing Workin’” ahead of the other tracks?

Jill: It was a hard decision because we have different favorites. We couldn’t decide if we wanted to give away our favorites or not. We definitely wanted to do one where we were kind of making fun of it and then also do a happy one. It wasn’t just like, here are two songs with the same idea. It’s funny because my favorite on the project is “Trouble In Paradise” but that one is probably Logan’s least favorite. 

Logan: I like the song, but it just takes a while to get going. In this day in age, we have short attention spans. Well, I guess that might not be true since people listen to three-hour podcasts. Anyways, if you’re going to hook people with a song you’ve got to do it quickly, and that song is just super slow to get going. I knew we needed to reel people in with something that’s straight to the point right off the bat. I felt like “Hitched Up” and “Love’s The Only Thing Workin’” were easily digestible compared to some of the other tracks. “The Honeymoon” is so quirky, so if people didn’t know that this is tongue-in-cheek, goofy, funny, and cheesy, it’s going to come across weird. Especially without a video. We wanted to have something that was more down the middle. My favorite song though is probably “Look What Our Love Made” because I like simple. Anytime a song is very simple, there’s not much too it, and it just kind of falls out, those are my favorite. We didn’t really have to work for that one and those are always my favorite ones. 

Will you two ever go on tour together as The Mizes?

Jill: We are planning on it.

Logan: Yeah. We are trying to put something together for January, so we are working on that. We’ll see what interest is. We’ve got to finish writing a full album and put that out. We’ve also got more music videos to film. This day and age it’s like a never-ending music video shoot every day to just promote your music. We have a lot of promotion to do with the EP and we will see where we are at at the top of the year. We’d love to take it out on the road.

Jill: We definitely have a vision for our live show. We want people to laugh and we want people to come and be entertained. It used to be that people would put on a show. I mean I don’t want to say a variety show, but it would be fun to have little sections in the show where we talk about a funny fight that we were in. Then we could have the audience pick whose side they are on for that particular fight. We want it to be very interactive to the point that no two shows are ever the same. 

Logan: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of work to do if we are going to go on tour, but we are working on it. 

What advice would you give to other couples that create music together?

Logan: I don’t know if we are in any situation to be giving anyone advice. 

Jill: I would say that we didn’t overthink. We really wrote the songs with our live show in mind. We thought about what we want people to feel when they come to our show. We knew we wanted them to laugh and to forget about all of their own issues. We just wanted to make it fun and funny but also real. I feel like before now, we would’ve been forcing it but now it’s actually really fun to do together. I’d say go with your gut and if it feels like the right time, just do it and don’t overthink it. 

Logan: I also think that couples have a certain dynamic. I feel like we didn’t fight that at all. We just let the energy of us two together, flow onto the paper and then we recorded it. We were just totally ourselves

Jill: We’re definitely not the lovey-dovey couple, so we went ahead and played into that. 

Fans can keep up with The Mizes on Instagram.