This is Sammy Rae’s second time at Levitate Music Festival. She and The Friends played the smaller stage back in 2024, when Jack Johnson headlined. This year, she’s playing direct support to Alanis Morissette, on a Saturday lineup that marks the first time Levitate has featured an entirely female lineup on the main stage.
“It’s huge, and is the sort of progress we need to see more of,” she tells me backstage. “I want to see more female-fronted bands, more queer-fronted bands, more bands fronted by people of color. I need to see more women owning venues, working house crew in venues, backstage. So definitely featuring an entire female lineup of featured artists is a step in the right direction. But there’s work to do for other communities that are minorities in the music industry. On stage and backstage.”
It’s a conversation Rae has clearly dedicated a lot of thought to, and she doesn’t stop at celebrating the lineup itself. I asked her what still needs to change, what we’re still not doing enough of, and she goes straight for the language everyone else takes for granted.
Drop the Caveats
“I think we need to be changing the vernacular that we’re using, and the verbiage around festivals and lineups,” she says. “I don’t need to be remembered as one of the most badass queer female band leaders of the time. I am one of the most badass band leaders of my time, straight up musicians, and I know that.”
She keeps building on the point: “We don’t need this caveat of, ‘oh, I saw this amazing Black-fronted band with this dope female bassist.’ You saw a dope band with a dope bassist. And sometimes it’s really important that you add these descriptors, to make space and uplift certain communities. But more often than not, I think that I’m doing more for queer visibility and women’s liberation if I’m just out there claiming that what I am is a badass band leader, and not having to add any caveats.”
The point is clear, especially with the context she drops next. “Nobody goes, ‘Oh, have you ever heard of the Beatles? They’re this amazing, male-led, entirely white rock band.’ Or, ‘So the Beatles. It’s like four straight white guys, they all kind of like the same height, and they’re really killing. Sick.’ She clarifies she loves The Beatles, but it’s a perfect example. The takeaway, as she puts it: “I think the way we can be making more progress is just being attentive to the language that we’re using.”
The Newest Era for Sammy Rae & The Friends
Rae’s new single, “You Just Wanna Get With My Friend,” takes a much lighter tone, and is some genuinely good (and much-needed these days) fun. It’s what she calls a tongue-in-cheek storytelling song about a flirtation gone sideways. “You’re having a moment with somebody, a flirtation, and you think they’re into you, but then they actually just want to get with your friend,” she explains. “Right on the nose, nice and easy.”
The music video adds a funny twist to it all though. Shot at a roller skating rink in the Catskill Mountains, it stars her real-life friend and fellow musician Brian Duke, who she’s taken to calling her twin. “As the song was even being written, I was like, what if the music video is like me and my friend, but my friend is Brian, and we’re dressed almost the same? What if the camp of it all is that the love interest leaves me for my friend, who looks exactly like me?”
Sounds like Duke didn’t need much convincing. “I talked to Brian about it, and he was like, ‘I’m in. Let’s wear the same outfit. Let’s go get the same haircut from the same woman on the same day, and I’m gonna get blue contacts.'” The production grew from there. An open call for 30 extras drew fans from as far as Chicago and Louisiana to a small-town rink in upstate NY. “We didn’t expect it,” Rae says. “We thought some people were gonna come up from the city and everybody else would be upstate. But we had somebody from Chicago, somebody from Louisiana. It’s a really, really special production.”
Leaving Brooklyn for the Woods
The single, Rae says, marks “the beginning of a new chapter.” She is careful about her language here, but she promises more music is coming before The Friends head out on a fall headline tour, running roughly from early September through mid-November.
The bigger shift, though, happened off stage: Rae recently left Brooklyn and moved to the Catskill Mountains, where she’ll hit her one-year mark this September.
It’s the first extended stretch off the road in the band’s history. “This is actually one of the first entire years where the Friends was off,” she says. “We’ve been touring pretty constantly.” She and co-writers Will Leat and Debbie Chong have spent long stretches at the house. Debbie’s own piano now lives there, alongside an organ gifted by Virtue and Vice Studios in Brooklyn, where the band did some of its earliest work. “It’s just this beautiful house with no neighbors, no distractions, and all of our gear lives out and available.”
“What’s been feeding me creatively is I have less distractions now,” she says. “I’ve reached a sort of new chapter in my identity as a songwriter and as a touring professional. I don’t have to do the most stimulating job in the world anymore, and come back to the most stimulating place in the world anymore. So that balance, I think, is healthy for both my writing process and my touring process. Both sides of the coin, I think, are healthier because of my relocating to the woods.”
It’s a natural progression of how the band already worked. Disappearing into the woods for arrangement retreats before recent albums, including last year’s covers record, recorded at Dreamland Studio in Hurley, New York. “Whenever we need to go on an arrangement retreat to finish songs before they go to the studio, or to practice for a tour, we disappear to the woods,” she says. “So it was kind of like, why don’t I just go relocate to where the source is? I knew that I was going to end up back in the woods eventually. I grew up in a very wooded area in small-town Connecticut.”
An Unresolved Mystery
No conversation with Sammy Rae stays serious for long. Ask about her well-documented cryptid obsession and she lights up immediately, describing what she calls a real breakthrough in her “cryptozoology career.”
“I have a neighbor that lives behind me that I know nothing about,” she says. “The seller of the home said, ‘I have no relationship to these people, I’ve been here for 40 years, I don’t know them.’ I heard the most harrowing sound come out of that backyard a couple days ago. I took a voice memo, I sent it to my dad and my brother, who were also intrigued by cryptids. My father’s vote is two black bears fighting. My brother’s vote is that it’s two bobcats fighting. To me, it sounds like an abnormally large wild boar. But, maybe Bigfoot.”
She recently guested on a podcast dedicated to the subject “two lovely ladies, they drink cocktails and talk about cryptids” (check out the Spirits Podcast featuring Sammy Rae here) where she spent, by her own account, over an hour on the Virginia-Brazil UFO incident. “It’s a deep debate in the cryptid community whether or not extraterrestrials are cryptids or not,” she says. “I personally believe that they are, because, in my opinion, they’re animals that may or may not exist. Which is the definition of a cryptid.”
Sammy Rae’s new chapter: new house, new single, and new tour on the horizon is already in motion. The Bigfoot situation, for now, remains unresolved.
Check out Sammy Rae and The Friends newest single and music video here, and check out the dates to their fall tour here. If they’re coming near your city, I can promise this is a show you need to be at.
Nathan Smith is a Providence-based music photographer and journalist focusing on capturing the special moments and unfiltered magic of live performances. Whether he’s shooting established artists at sold-out TD Garden shows or documenting the rise of emerging local bands, his goal is the same: to pull viewers directly into the heart of the moment.
His writing spotlights rising artists and local scenes, with a focus on telling the stories that often get overlooked. A lifelong music fan and musician himself, Nathan approaches interviews and portraits as conversations rather than transactions, building trust with artists so their genuine personalities can shine through. Whether he’s backstage, in the photo pit, or at home in front of the keyboard, he brings the same curiosity and care to every assignment.
Outside of his press work with Juice Box Press, Nathan works regularly as a photographer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as numerous bands in the Boston and Providence area. Nathan also plays violin with a local orchestra, follows Celtics basketball almost religiously, and is an avid fantasy reader.