It's been an interesting season of Nashville Star, as several of this year's country music hopefuls have pulled out all the stops in the hope of becoming the next big thing in Music City, or "Nashvegas" to its locals. A week after Nashville Star saw its biggest shocker of the season with the departure of Pearl Heart, which caused a stir among judges Jeffrey Steele, Jon Rich, and Jewel, singing duo Laura and Sophie were handed their walking papers in a move a lot of people saw coming.

A day after their exit, we caught up with Laura and Sophie to find out how they felt about leaving the show, whether they thought the fans got it right with the departure of Pearl Heart, and what's in store for their musical future.

THE DEADBOLT: After the previous week’s performance, did you talk with the other contestants about how the voting went down?

LAURA: We actually don’t know how the voting goes. We don’t know how it’s announced - if it’s random, if it’s put together. We’re not sure how it goes. All we know is the bottom two, is the bottom two.

THE DEADBOLT: Okay, well, do you think the public got it right last week [with Pearl Heart]?

SOPHIE: That’s really hard to say, because I know that the rest of the cast. None of us were expecting Pearl Heart to go home that soon. Last week, that elimination was extremely shocking. But like it’s been said so many times, it’s anyone’s competition at this point and it’s all about what America wants. And we don’t know, we have to just kind of wait and see.

THE DEADBOLT: Did the judges say anything to you two before or after the show?

LAURA: We actually don’t get to communicate with the judges unless we are on our mentor days and we don’t have much time with the judges. But Jeffrey, he’s a great mentor.

THE DEADBOLT: How did you two prepare for [this week's] performance?

LAURA: We kind of have - besides the fact of signing together all week - before we go on we do this thing where we face each other and do five or ten really deep breaths. It kind of gets us in the zone and our nerves under control so we can perform without getting shaky and freaking out.

THE DEADBOLT: How do you think you’ve changed from when you first auditioned?

LAURA: From the first audition my personality and my maturity level has defiantly changed. Everything that I’ve known before this competition has pretty much changed - changed my view on life and everything that I thought was reasonable. Now I think that I was being unreasonable. I can’t even explain what an impact it’s had on me.

SOPHIE: I defiantly feel this competition has changed me so much. I feel like I’m defiantly a completely different person than I was when I started out. I agree with Laura, we both defiantly matured a lot and we now understand more how the business works. So that, when we do hopefully get into it for real we’ll know what to expect a little bit more than we did before.

THE DEADBOLT: You mentioned that you’ve been through a lot together. Has this show tested your friendship even more?

SOPHIE: The show has definitely tested our friendship further and we survived it and we could’ve survived it had we won. So that just proves to both of us that we can handle anything you throw at us. And we’re definitely in it together and we’re going to stay together and it’s not going to ruin our friendship.

THE DEADBOLT: Where do you want to be in a year or two?

LAURA: In a year or so we’d definitely like to be working on our music and getting somewhere with that. But if the music isn’t working out, I definitely want to be going to college. I want to be in broadcasting and communications and Sophie really wants to finish high school. She wants to get her high school diploma and graduate like I did. So everything is going to work out either way.

THE DEADBOLT: If you could change anything about any of your performances, what would you have done differently?

SOPHIE: You know, I can honestly say - this is the piece I want to give the judges - I can honestly say we wouldn’t change anything, because everything we’ve done has gotten us to where we are now and we’re totally happy with where we are. And we’re happy with everything we’ve been through and everything we’ve accomplished. So we wouldn’t change a thing.