Daily Inspiration: Meet Sam Miller, Anthony Felts and Emily Ferguson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Miller, Anthony Felts, and Emily Ferguson. 

Hi Sam, Anthony, and Emily, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
We started Wild Love Tigress in 2012 when a group of high-school musicians played an impromptu set at a house party and discovered their shared love of playing high-energy funk music. Three of those musicians – Anthony Felts (lead guitar/vocals/keys), Keaton Baker (bass), and Sam Miller (vocals/rhythm guitar) have kept the band going ever since, over the course of several lineup changes (and various members going to college out of state). These days, the band’s lineup is rounded out by drummer Jake Fernstrum, horn players Nicolas Killeen (saxophone) and Isaac Rey-Pederson (trumpet), and vocalists Emily Ferguson and Kat Clark. 

Our biggest goal as a band is to write good songs that audiences have fun listening to and dancing to. We have all spent a lot of time playing in various bands – often bands that mainly play covers. It’s certainly a lot easier to get a crowd engaged and dancing when you are playing songs they already know and like, but we enjoy the challenge of trying to get the same reaction with music we wrote ourselves. Music is the central passion in our lives, and more than anything we just want our audience to enjoy listening to our songs as much as we enjoy playing them. 

We released our first official album, Live from the Proto-Apocalypse, in November of 2020, and we are currently in the studio working on a follow-up. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest challenge for us has been one that all bands (especially bands with a lot of members) face to some degree – how to keep moving forward when life is pulling you in different directions. As much as we want to pour all of our time and effort into our music, we have to take care of ourselves and pay our bills. That has meant band members moving out of state for years to go to college; it has meant the constant struggle of scheduling gigs, practices, and recording sessions around the schedules of eight different people with full-time jobs; it has meant looking for ways to keep all our momentum from slipping away when the COVID pandemic kept us from playing live (or even rehearsing in the same room) for months. 

We love the music-making part of what we do, but when we first started out, we sort of assumed that all we had to do to be successful was just make good music. It was quite a learning curve for us to realize how much other work needed to be done – promoting on social media, pitching ourselves to potential venues, designing websites and show posters, budgeting our band funds to cover merchandise, and recording. We’ve gotten better at those things, but there are certainly lessons that we wish we had learned a lot sooner. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We play high-energy, original music rooted in classic American funk, soul, and blues. We particularly pride ourselves on the energy and excitement of our live shows; even in the smallest bar, playing for the smallest crowd, we try to deliver a performance that the crowd can’t help but remember. The funk genre – with its large bands, group vocals, and emphasis on dancing – is a very communal musical style, and we want that to be central to who we are; we always want the audience to feel that they are involved in a show, instead of just observing it. 

Any big plans?
Currently, we are working on recording a full studio album, to be released for streaming (and hopefully on vinyl as well) in the summer of 2022. Once that is complete, our next goal is to work towards playing bigger venues – first locally, and then on the road. 

Contact Info:

• Email: wildlovetigress1@gmail.com
• Website: www.wildlovetigress.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewildlovetigress/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WildLoveTigress/
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1wHgpC0NeIYvABWesq5kIR?si=jXJF4vASS5-SqwfH5f89Hg

Image Credits
Taylor Wilson
Erik Fellenstein
Kevin Miller