When Maddie Marlow and Tae Dye — better known to country fans as Maddie & Tae — were putting together their freshman album, Start Here, the young women found themselves with a (good) problem: It was harder for them to choose which songs to leave off the record than it was to select which ones to include.

"We had to really choose carefully because we’ve got a catalog of about 200 songs, and this is our handshake to the world of our story, Maddie and Tae," Marlow tells The Boot. "We really had to choose wisely and find what songs fit this first album the best. There’s a couple that we wanted on here, but we didn’t have room for it, so we were like, ‘We’ll save it for the second album.’"

The two co-wrote all 11 of the project's songs, but after they narrowed the list down to those final tunes, the process still wasn't done. Next, they spent a lot of time choosing the songs' order.

"We wanted the album to feel like a story, to feel like you were listening to a story in a book," Marlow continues. "So this is like the first book ... and every song like a chapter."

Start Here kicks off with "Waitin' on a Plane," which Marlow describes as "basically the beginning of our journey, just kind of taking that leap of faith and going after this crazy dream that we’ve both had forever." The record ends with "Downside of Growing Up," a tune that Marlow adds "is kind of where we still are, mentally, today, where we’re both 19 and 20, but when you’re going through that time in your life, it’s hard ... That’s kind of the last thing that we’ve learned in the past five years.

"It’s a nice, cohesive story," Marlow explains.

Maddie & Tae soared to the top of the charts last year with their humorous debut single, "Girl in a Country Song;" they followed it up with the thought-provoking "Fly." As they move forward, both women say that their focus is less on which songs are radio friendly and more on which ones will resonate with their audience.

"The reason we chose "Fly" [as our second single] is because we wanted a different song than "Girl in a Country Song,"" Dye explains. ""Girl in a Country Song" showed our funny and witty side, and [it is] very uptempo, so ... we wanted a slow song to show our fans that we do have both sides to us, and to pick songs for our album, we wanted to show our fans all the different sides of us.

"So I think, when choosing songs, it just mattered what it meant to us and if we thought our fans would relate to it," she adds. "Obviously you can’t think about, ‘Oh, this one might not go up the charts as fast, or even reach No. 1.’ But to us, that’s not the point. The point is that we reach our fans, and we let them know that we are engaged, and we just want to give them our message."

The rising country duo originally planned to release Start Here on June 2, but the disc was delayed until Aug. 28 to make sure everything was perfect for their loyal fans. It was a smart move, Maddie & Tae recognize, but it was still hard to do.

"We were just crushed, because we were expecting to go out on tour with Dierks Bentley and have our whole album to our fans," Dye recalls. "Hearing that we were going to have to push it back, our initial reaction was sad. But now, thinking back, we’ve gotten to perfect everything, we’ve gotten to change some things. We really got to spend time to craft it into the perfect, dream album, which we probably wouldn’t have had if we had rushed it."

The end result is an album that both girls are proud of, from start to finish.

"We got the music right and exactly the way we wanted it," Marlow notes. "And the album artwork was really important for us, because these days, everyone just buys music online, but we wanted to do something that was going to make our fans want to get a physical thing. So we did hand-written lyrics all over the album. The back page of it has our favorite lyric from each song written out. I drew these terrible pictures."

With a maturity that belies their young ages, both Marlow and Dye work hard at making every decision together and maintaining their close friendship far past their professional relationship.

"It’s never an argument. It’s always a creative discussion," Dye says. "I think people think because we’re two young girls that we just cat fight all the time. If something’s wrong, we talk about it ... But we always find a compromise. It’s always meeting in the middle and making sure that she’s happy and I’m happy and we’re both comfortable with whatever we’re doing."

Maddie & Tae are currently crossing the country with Bentley, on his 2015 Sounds of Summer Tour, but they will launch their own headlining tour this fall. See a list of all of their upcoming shows on their website.

Start Here is available for pre-order on iTunes.

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