Sammy Rae Finds Strength in the Diversity of Her Friends

Brooklyn musical collective Sammy Rae and the Friends brings together a diverse group of people who represent different ages, economic backgrounds, nationalities and gender orientations. It comes out in the music, a balanced blend of rock and jazz.

It’s also music to hear live, and Denverites will have their chance when Sammy Rae and the Friends play the Gothic Theatre on Wednesday, November 2.

“We put a lot of stock into the live show,” Sammy Rae says. “It’s pretty much a show from beginning to end.”

Frontwoman Rae finds strength in the diversity of the band’s lineup, and she loves to see how that extends to the crowds flooding to see the genre-defying septet as it tours the United States, hitting many places for the first time this year.

“A lot of our audience is young and queer,” Rae says. “A lot of our audience looks like us, which is great.”



Rae says the band set out from the beginning to create a live space that's completely oriented toward making its audience feel welcome. “Our mission statement has always been how to say thank you every way we can,” she explains. “We work really hard to make sure our audience feels safe, feels welcome, feels appreciated, feels that sense of gratitude.”

That sentiment makes sense from an economic standpoint. If people aren’t coming to shows, they aren’t buying merchandise and tickets, and members of the Friends might find themselves as hobby musicians who have to go out and get regular jobs. And that’s all true, but the idea of the show as a fun, comfortable environment is what’s most important to Rae. She hates to use the phrase “mission statement,” but that’s kind of what it is.

The band has developed a strong following in the Northeast, but Rae has been heartened to see the group's very young, very creative, very multicultural and very queer audience popping up in unexpected places, such as the Deep South. It’s been a happy realization, but still kind of shocking to see.

“The sort of space we create is much more hard-sought in some of those environments for that audience than it is in New York City or Philly,” she says. “In Birmingham, Alabama, we had this amazing turnout, and the audience was so, ‘We don’t get a space like this to feel taken care of very often.’”

Rae says the band was fortunate and fared well through the pandemic lockdowns, making fans far and wide and seeing an uptick in streams. She adds that Sammy Rae and the Friends can easily sell 3,000 tickets in New York, but she’s been pleasantly surprised to sell 850 or even a thousand in cities in Texas. As the band prepared to tour, she wondered whether there would be much of a draw in those locales. And people seem to have made quite the effort to come out, some driving half a day or more.

“We're getting a lot more ‘I drove for six hours to be here,’” she says. “‘I made so many friends here tonight.’ 'It’s such a gathering of like-minded individuals,’ and ‘I’m grateful for this sort of mixer environment you’ve cultivated.’”

In addition to Alabama and Texas, the band is hitting multiple other states for the first time, including Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, Louisiana and parts of the West Coast it hasn’t played before.

“We were relatively green to touring before [the 2020 COVID lockdowns],” Rae says. “Once it was safe to tour again, there was really this explosion for tickets in places just outside of the East Coast, where we were predominantly touring.”

The band’s EPs The Good Life and Let’s Throw a Party defy genre categorization. Rae takes influence from jazz vocalists like Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald — people who used their voice as more of an instrument — but she also grew up on the classic rock of her parents. She wanted a big ensemble akin to the E Street Band when she was putting together what would become the Friends.

And with its diversity as a strength, members of the Friends bring everything from a love of world music and Latin beat to jam bands, classic rock, pop, Broadway and jazz. As time has gone on, they’ve figured out how to bring these disparate elements together and make it work.

“There’s this aspect of uniquely talented individuals,” Rae says. “Stevie Van Zandt doesn’t sound anything like Bruce Springsteen when he plays guitar. That was always my vision when I was young and setting out to form a band.”

She adds that “hang” is also a crucial factor. You can have an incredibly talented group of musicians in the same room, but if they all hate each other, what’s the point?

“It was important to me to find people who were longevity-oriented,” she says. “And the folks we ended up with are the lineup we have now.”

Sammy Rae and the Friends, 8 p.m. Wednesday, November 2, Gothic Theatre, 3263 South Broadway, Englewood. Tickets are $32.50.