By Brian D’Ambrosio
Authenticity suspends around the Felice Brothers like a halo. It’s the kind of resounding on-our-own-terms radiance that independent musicians yearn to earn.
If art is a tough grind, the rocking, experimental sound of the Felice Brothers is a leisurely walk. To be sure, the New York based group – a close-knit band of five friends, including two brothers – has built a 10-year career on exuberant strings, quirky acoustic compositions, and sorrowfully beautiful lyricism.
The sum of their voyage is enough to satisfy Americana music hounds searching for a brand that strips away the layers of artifice with a coarse, serrated feel that connects to the tradition’s roots.
Improvisational and self-taught, the Felice Brothers also hammer the point that we shouldn’t always believe in our limitations, no matter how concrete they may seem.
“We started out not knowing how to play music,” explained James Felice. “But we’ve always loved to perform and we started performing on New York subways and at farmers markets. We’ve recorded in old abandoned high schools and chicken coops and we’ve recorded on our terms. It’s raw. It’s rough. But we make the music the same way that we live out our lives, recording in a garage around chickens and ducks and pigs and livestock.”
Mainstream music has been inundated with so many sounds professing so many aphorisms and commercial Top 40 rules parading as truth that our musical clichés have clichés. The Felice Brothers dig through the platitudes and find out and share what’s true. At the same time upfront and acutely literate, the band’s latest, “Life in the Dark,” features nine songs depicting the hope and angst, the craving and resignation, of a seemingly rootless, on edge land at another point of upheaval. The Felice Brothers (James and Ian) are joined by longtime buddies Josh Rawson on bass and Greg Farley on fiddle, with drums by David Estabrook.
“Life in the Dark,” which coincides with the Felice Brothers’ 10th anniversary as a group, is a compilation of offbeat stories and satirical allegories about authenticity, art, and chasing fulfillment by living through both yourself and others. It’s risky, strange, and played with confidence and cohesive style.
Perhaps music doesn’t need so many rules. After all, the Felice Brothers self-produced their latest in the semi-rural Hudson, New York-area (population less than 7,000), in a garage on a poultry farm. Engineered by James Felice (who contributed accordion, keyboards and vocals), the recording is a passage into eclectic musical flavors, with imperfections welcomed. It’s rough, yet the acoustic instruments and open arrangements are liberating; it’s enthusiastic, stripped down, fun, and quirkily reassuring, like the sound of cooing in your ear. As the chickens cluck, the boys showcase the sound with ricochets of white hillbilly and rural blues.
“I grew up listening to a lot of folk music,” said Felice, “Woody Guthrie. Pete Seeger. Mississippi John Hurt. Skip James. Ian is more of a connoisseur of old folk-blues than I am. I love Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, and that is sort of the vein in which we play – and how they play. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. We play from the gut and that’s how they played. It’s never too clean, too polished, or too produced. You have these certain feelings when you hear those records.”
“To put this album together we decided that we still needed a structure,” said Felice. “But you still don’t force it. Ian wrote most of the songs and we played and recorded, and we treated it like a job. We’d meet every morning at 10; I’d get there a little earlier because I was engineering. If it was awesome, we would keep going. No vibe? Then we’d call it. We did approach it like a job, but just not too rigorous and strict. Our strengths are focusing on the quality of Ian’s songwriting and the energy and quality of the live show. We are not go-getters. We are quiet people and we focus on music.”
Indeed, the Felice Brothers are the convergence of a group of friends who came together for a simple embrace full of recognition of folk-Americana’s history of grace, guts and gratitude.
“We recorded ‘Life in the Dark’ with a couple of mics and a garage, and sure there are more bands out there and there is more competition for time and space in people’s lives. We are competing more than the guys had to do in the past. But today it is so much easier to make music and so much easier to get your name around. There is much less value on music today and it’s much cheaper to make.”
Ian and James Felice were raised in a middle class family in the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley area of Upstate New York. Dad was originally from Queens; he’d escaped the madness of angry gridlock, swapping the concrete and asphalt for the semi-agricultural land of maple trees, colorfully-conducive to the painter’s palette.
“I grew up in the woods and we couldn’t see our neighbors,” said James. “That’s how my brother and I grew up, and the guys in the band the same way. We grew up running around the Catskill Mountains and I’ve lived in Ulster County my whole life, pretty much. To be lucky enough to have been born in a place you love is a gift and there has never been a desire to go somewhere else. We could have gone to New York City and struggled, but there was no desire. In this area, you can be alone, in the quiet, and have access to the art, culture and the vibrancy of New York City – and that’s unique and supremely lucky.”
A night with the Felice Brothers is a trip of folk and blues touchstones, natural, whirling accordions and whopping, roomy rhythms and mournful twinkles of electric guitar. It’s a saga of fiddles and ramshackle, blues-rock numbers full of gritty lead guitars, unruly blasts of organ and hollering choruses. “Life in the Dark” is something of a parable for contemporary America, with songs that soar high on the wings of the wild tragicomic tangle of Ian Felice’s imagination (most, if not all, of the band’s songs are written by him). The lyrics twist modern interpretations of traditional archetypes: folk heroine gunslingers, love-struck kids, and the adventurous escapades of bandits.
“Ian’s songwriting is playful and evocative and he tells an extremely potent story,” said James. “You can laugh one line and cry the next – and that’s hard to pull off. We have eight, nine records down and he’s written one hundred songs and one of our strengths as a band is him as a songwriter.”
Indeed, it was Ian who convinced his brother James to reject the norms of conventional life, the one who decided that the brothers would not apply convention to their music, or even to their own personal lives.
“When we first started, Ian worked a bunch of shitty jobs, and he was 23, and I was 20,” said James. “Ian was the one who said, ‘I never want have a boss again.’ He said, ‘I’m not doing the 9 to 5 thing.’ We opted out of that life.”
