Page 9 - ION Indie Magazine SeptOct 2023

Sammy Rae Starts The Good Life...

Sammy Rae always knew she wanted to be a star, taking up the stage and making people happy
with her passion was something she dreamed of even as a little girl in small-town Derby,
Connecticut, listening to the big bands that inspired her.

“When I was a child, I had this dream of doing the whole music industry thing, which was as big as
you can dream for a kid from a very small town,” Rae chuckled. “But when I got to New York in my
early twenties, I realized, not only am I talented and capable in a small town, I'm also very talented
and capable in a city where people who are talented and capable go. I have what it takes to really
do this thing. But I knew from the very beginning that I needed to form a band.”

“I really loved and love Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street
Band – these are players who were together on every record through the years through the decades,
and I wanted that friendship that came with the people in it,” Rae smiled. “I knew from the very
beginning I wanted to form a band and I didn't want to do this thing solo; I was talking about a
permanent core group of people.”

But with a big dream of a big band, came big work and Rae revealed they cycled through a few great
players before landing with the band they currently have and plan to stick with.

“People did sort of cycle out predominantly in the first year as we were getting our feet set and the
band started to grow, I needed different sorts of people and also some people were excited about
the prospect of the band growing and other people were not or were involved in other projects,” Rae
explained. “This project started to demand a higher level of commitment and some just weren’t ready
for that, but this core group, apart from Debbie Tjong who joined us about a year and a half ago as
our keys player, has been The Friends for the last five years. And we rock it.”