Daily Inspiration: Meet Patrick LeFils

Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick LeFils.

Hi Patrick, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Southern Fellow started three and a half years ago. Honestly, this was not a big dream of mine or even on my radar. This is all a product of circumstance. A few years back, I had my first of many seizures. Coming from a ranching family and being a full-time chef, daily tasks that were pure muscle memory at that point in my life could now be life-threatening. Everything came to a screeching halt. I had two choices. Get severely depressed or find something to occupy my time. I chose the latter.

Family and friends have asked me to write down recipes for years, and I never gave it too much thought. Finally, I decided to do just that. I taught myself how to build a website and turned my home kitchen into a makeshift test kitchen. I was creating two recipes a week. Three months into this, Erinn Peet Lukes, a bluegrass artist out of Colorado, asked me about one of my recipes on Instagram. A question about pasta turned into a conversation on the difficulties of independent artists finding an audience. I wanted to use the audience I had at the time to help her, but the music was not something I did.

I took a few days to think about it and came up with an idea. First, we would do an interview, and then I would create a recipe around Erinn and that interview. To my surprise, people liked it. I thought it would be a one-off, but Nashville had different plans. Exactly two weeks after that interview, I was contacted by two publicists and an artist wanting me to repeat what I had done for Erinn. Thus, Feed the Band was born and is now our most popular series.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I have a severe form of epilepsy. I still have several a month, making meeting deadlines, conducting interviews, recipe development, and keeping up with social media difficult. However, Southern Fellow is a family. Artists, publicists, and friends pick up the torch on days I can not. This fact is Southern Fellow’s greatest strength and makes us unique as a media outlet. We would exist without the help of Caroline and Mike Walker, Jordan Mohr, Taylor Teasley, Nicole Zeller, and so many more people.

Thanks for sharing that. So, you could tell us a bit more about your work.
We are a food and music media outlet. Southern Fellow is best known for Feed the Band. There we interview music artists and then create a recipe around the interview. We also do song reviews and host amazing concerts featuring our Southern Fellow Family in Nashville as well as Central Florida; It would be awesome for Nashville Voyager to see us in action one of these days.

What are your plans for the future?
We do primarily written content at the moment. I hope the Southern Fellow can expand into videos and podcasts; we had our first artist food pairing and concert at Cabana Taps back and March. I would love to do more of those Downtown.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.southernfellow.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southernfellow_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/southernfellowofficial