The Snow Owls may have missed out on a spot in the Super Six on The Masked Singer, but Clint Black and Lisa Hartman — the husband and wife duo who portrayed the singing birds — aren’t too broken up about their loss. The country music star and award-winning actress will go down in Masked Singer history as the first two-person team, but couldn’t squeeze out a victory over Popcorn in the Smackdown round Wednesday.
“It’s really mixed,” Hartman, 64, told PEOPLE of being eliminated. “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.” While the couple had a blast with their masked identities, Black admitted, “I wish I’d had an air conditioner in there. It was like hot yoga without the yoga. It was a sweatbox. And then maneuvering around that in that egg was really challenging. We could only move negative two miles an hour.”
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Hartman chimed in, “In little side steps. 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.” Black shared that because of the “tricky” maneuvering, his heart rate would go up “20 beats” before he was supposed to start singing. “I’m used to relaxing before a show so this was really different,” he explained.
The experience brought back the magic of singing together to the couple. The duo, married since 1991, topped the country charts with their duet, “When I Said I Do” in 1999, and is now planning to drop a new song, “Till the End of Time,” together on Dec. 2. “After we finished the show, we thought about recording that song,” Black said of Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion’s ‘The Prayer,’ which they 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.”
Through all the sweaty costumes and high-stress performing, Hartman said the experience on the FOX show made them closer. “We had never done anything like this, so we really leaned on each other,” she explained. “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.”
