Sammy Rae started on piano, wrote her first batch of songs at 12, and grew up in Derby, Connecticut listing Bruce Springsteen, Ella Fitzgerald, and Freddie Mercury among her primary influences — a spread wide enough to explain both the restlessness of her band’s genre and the confidence with which they inhabit it. Sammy Rae & The Friends do not land on a single sound, and after years of sold-out rooms from New York City to London, they have stopped apologizing for it.
About the Show
The collective is midway through “The Get Down!” — a North American tour built around Something For Everybody, their 2024 debut album on Nettwerk. It is the band’s third release, following the EPs The Good Life (2018) and Let’s Throw a Party (2021), and it arrived in September 2024 with a release party at a New York City venue that drew more than 1,100 attendees — one measure of a fanbase that grew almost entirely through word of mouth. Recent singles “You Just Wanna Get With My Friend” and “Boogie All By Yourself” mark where the sound sits now: somewhere in the overlap of classic rock, folk, funk, soul, and jazz, which the band describes as not a genre but “what best serves the song.”
The live show, by the band’s own account, runs on “palpable chemistry, deft virtuosity, and vocal fireworks,” and the rooms that have responded have grown steadily. Rae relocated to New York City from Connecticut in her early twenties without a social circle and built one, which became both the literal band and the philosophy underneath it. “A family first,” they say of themselves, with a mantra to match: “go put a smile on somebody’s face, go tell somebody they’ve got a place in this world.” Growth has been organic, driven by “friends telling friends,” and it has carried the band to Bonnaroo’s main stage, Sound on Sound, and All Things Go, and to venues including London’s O2 Academy Brixton. Their own read on the eclecticism: “if we haven’t landed on one avenue by now, I guess we never will. And that’s our superpower.”
Venue & Logistics
Higher Ground hosts the band for a two-night stand on this leg of the tour, with Friday, February 26 and this night, Saturday, February 27, both on the calendar. The venue is in South Burlington, Vermont, part of the north-country region. Doors open at 7:00 p.m.; the show starts at 8:00 p.m. All ages; no support act is listed.
Tickets
Tickets are $30–$35. On sale Friday, September 25. Buy tickets