Denver funk band Wild Love Tigress formed when the world was about to end…or so people thought. It was 2012, and many were grappling with how the Mayan Long Count calendar ended on December 21; in other words, the apocalypse was nigh. Did it matter that experts in Mayan culture pointed out that it didn’t mean that at all? It did not. It was the end of the world, and everyone was feeling fine.
So fine, in fact, that a student from Denver School of the Arts was planning an epic bash to go out on a high note — an End of the World house party — and asked fellow DSA seniors Sam Miller and Anthony Felts to perform, alongside bass player Keaton Baker. “That was the first gig we ever played, at that party,” Miller says, laughing. “That was where it all started.”
What they played at that debut — and the name of the band, too — actually comes from the Will Ferrell movie Anchorman. “Sam and I were definitely not super-drunk at his parent’s cabin when we were like seventeen,” Felts says with a grin. “There’s this scene where Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate get together, and he calls her his wild love tigress, and we paused the movie and agreed that if we ever started a band, we’d call it Wild Love Tigress. So when we did form a band and call ourselves that, we were an Anchorman-themed band. We did, like, a Jazz Odyssey, we played “Afternoon Delight. At that point, we’d written, like, one song.”…