The Sledge Grits Band is a pop-rock band consisting of sisters Keiko, Ella, Mimi and bo-Pah Sledge. We recently chatted with the sisters about their powerful music and spreading an awesome girl power message!

The Sledge sisters grew up around musical diversity.

“Our mom is a huge 80s rock fan,” Ella said. “Our dad loves blues and zydeco and country. We just grew up with a lot of different types of music in the house. We were always listening to it and so we gravitated toward it.”

They started creating music of their own when they were very young, and started singing with their mom.

“She played a little bit of piano and she would teach us notes, so we would always sing around the house,” Keiko said.

When the Sledge family moved from their home in northern Florida to California, they were going through a very difficult time.

“There were a lot of us living in a little bitty house, our grandmother had just passed away from breast cancer and our dad had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis,” Keiko explained. “We decided to take up music as something to get our mind off of things.”

Keiko and Ella started taking guitar lessons. A little later, Mimi wanted to follow in her older sisters’ footsteps, and started playing the guitar as well.

“bo-pah would always kind of keep tempo for us, just on the bottom of a pot, and it grew from there,” Ella said. “I decided I didn’t want to play guitar anymore, so I was looking for another instrument and I went over to bass. It’s kind of like the guitar but a little more my personality.”

From there, bo-Pah got her own full-size drum kit, and when Mimi turned 8, she found her voice and became the lead singer of the band.

The Sledge Grits Band gets their name from a combination of their last name, Sledge, with Grits, an acronym.

“Grits is short for ‘girls raised in the sun,’” Mimi explained. “We’re from Florida, and we moved to California.”

Keiko is the group’s primary songwriter.

“I’ll have some type of emotion I want to let out and I just grab my guitar and start writing,” Keiko said. “Usually the melody will come into my head, and then the lyrics. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of cowriting with other writers and producers here in Los Angeles who are working on our album.”

Mimi’s incredible vocals are inspired by powerhouse singers like Mariah Carey and Adele.

“As a band, we like to a lot of Avril Lavigne, P!nk, and Kelly Clarkson,” Keiko said. “They’re very pop-rock and that’s the genre that we are playing.”

But the band is influenced by a lot more than the pop-rock genre.

“We always had a whole bunch of music, like zydeco and blues around our house, and I think it definitely influenced us,” Keiko said. “Our parents always told us the importance of knowing your background, and we’ve listen to every type of music you can imagine since we were little. I think that in the songwriting process it definitely comes out.”

Recently, The Sledge Grits Band also played for a crowd of 10,000 at a Girl Scouting event called Girltopia.

“It was so awesome playing in front of all those Girl Scouts because they were so interactive and I loved playing for everyone my age,” bo-Pah said. “It was just a lot of fun. We’ve been doing a few Girl Scout shows and all of them are just so awesome.”

The sisters took the stage at the event to promote girl power, and told us that it’s a message they want to keep fighting for.

“We’re all girls, we’re all sisters, and we’re all very young,” Ella said. “We think that girls should be able to do whatever they want to do, and there’s nothing holding them back. We want to inspire girls to reach for their dreams and do whatever they want with their lives.”

Currently, the Sledge Grits Band are working on their debut album, and hope to release some new music in the meantime. We can’t wait to see what they have in store! Curious about the band? Check out their social channels below!

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