Clint Black and Lisa Hartman Black’s Time on ‘The Masked Singer’ ‘Made Us Closer and Stronger’

Clint Black and Lisa Hartman Black were unmasked as the Snow Owls on The Masked Singer this week after the husband and wife duo lost against Popcorn in the Smackdown round of the Fox reality show, but there was a silver lining to their exit from the series. “You want to go the whole way, but it seems like it’s been a long time we’ve had this big secret, so it’s nice to talk about it,” Hartman Black told PEOPLE, adding that the experience “made us closer and stronger.”

“We had never done anything like this, so we really leaned on each other,” she said. “I was holding his hand. He was holding my hand a lot. We had little signals where we’d touch each other. We knew it meant like, ‘Turn and look at me.’ The compatibility certainly where this was concerned was really, really good.”

As for the actual logistics of their Snow Owls costume, which saw the two dressed as owls inside an egg, Black admitted that the outfit “was like hot yoga without the yoga.” “It was a sweatbox,” he shared. “And then maneuvering around that in that egg was really challenging. We could only move negative two miles an hour.” “In little side steps,” his wife added. “And you had a couple of handbrakes inside. We had to maneuver the thing and it had a mind of its own! So that was adding to the challenge of all the obvious, but we made it work.”

Working on the show was a difficult process, but the couple shared that going through the experience together made it easier to navigate.

“We had a lot of laughs and would come home at night and look at each other and just collapse,” Hartman Black recalled. “We’d sit across from each other, go, “Wow, we did it.” You feel like you’ve made it over some more hurdles and you didn’t fall off the stage.”

“The process leading up to it was pretty stressful because we were under time constraints to get the songs selected, get our key selected, rearrange the song and so it was an exercise in compromise for us,” Black shared. “I think because we are married and we worked through all of this together, it made a big difference. It made it better.”

Another benefit for the pair was the chance to sing together again, which inspired Black to write a new song featuring his wife. Titled “Till the End of Time,” the song will be released on Dec. 3.

“After we finished the show, we thought about recording that song,” Black said, referencing Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion‘s ‘The Prayer,’ which the couple performed on Wednesday’s episode. “And that’s when I said, ‘What if I just write us a new duet?’ We really wanted to record something again, have something new to perform together like we did on The Masked Singer.”