Felice Brothers

Features • Friday April 24th, 2009 • 12:00 am

It’s often said that returning to our roots is a good thing. It keeps us grounded, remembering where we came from and appreciative of our current status. For the Felice Brothers, that means continuing to play the subway from time to time, even as their rising country/folk rock status takes them to stages much bigger than they ever dreamed.

The now five-piece band features three Felice Brothers, Simone, Ian and James, along with two friends, affectionately known as Farley and Christmas, who’ve made quite a name for themselves. They mesmerizingly channel old-school Johnny Cash and the deep, dark beginnings of country blues, all in a modern context. It’s a surprising act with a surprising beginning and James was more than happy to tell us all about it in this SSv interview.

SSv: It seems you guys really came from nowhere to establish this sound of yours and move from playing subways to playing major music festivals. Do you guys reflect at all on this journey? Does it seem that fast from the inside?

James Felice: You know, you try not to. [Laughs] I mean, we see people coming to shows – people we’ve never met in places we’ve never been before and they’re there to hear our music and our reputation precedes us and all that. So it’s obvious that we’ve come a long, long way since we’ve started. But we don’t sit around and talk about how successful we are. That’s the last thing we would do before we fall on our faces. [Laughs]

SSv: Do you talk about your trajectory at all and where you want to be?

James: No. Hell, no. It all happened by accident. All we knew is that we wanted to play music as our real jobs and we knew that if we worked really hard at it, we could survive just playing music. We didn’t have anything – a place to live or equipment or anything. But we knew if we kept playing every day as hard as we could with everything that we have, we could just do that. We would be okay. So we’ve come to the place where some of the hard work is paying off. Of course, we’re still working as hard as we ever did in day one. You just don’t think about the future or that kind of stuff. We just want to make good music. We just don’t want to suck.

SSv: You say that you want to make good music, so when you go into the studio for Yonder, did that definition change from the first go-around?

James: It definitely did. Always when we’re in the studio, we evolve a lot. When we’re on the road, you don’t have that much time to think about what you’re doing. You have a formula that works and you do it. Things change and you’re writing parts and writing stuff like that. But in the studio, you have to listen to the shit that you’re recording a hundred times, then you have to reconsider things. It becomes too annoying to listen to.

When we were in the studio for Yonder, it was the first time we were in a place where we knew that we could stay and finish the whole record. That’d never happened to us before. All the other records we’ve done have only been done piecemeal to find time and money to record a bit at a time. But for this one, we wanted to make an actual record and grow as musicians and songwriters, too, so how are we going to do that? So that’s how it happened.

SSv: I would think the ability to stay in the studio for the long-term and finish the project at once would create a cohesion that other projects lacked.

James: That’s absolutely true. The last record is something we’re proud of and it’s good, but it really wasn’t a single shot. It wasn’t a real record. It was very much a piecemeal – I’ll use that word since it’s all I can think of. It was thrown together and it wasn’t a real story. It was our music and all these songs that we like, but it didn’t have that record feel that all of our favorites have. So for this one, for Yonder, we really got to do that. That was really important to us.

There were 30 or so songs that we were picking through and some really good songs we put aside because it didn’t feel like they fit. We think we did a pretty good job picking songs with the same feel. You can place these songs together and it makes sense. They feel like a story.

SSv: So what’s the story you’re telling on Yonder?

James: It’s not a traditional story, but there’s a definite feeling there or thought or theme – whatever you want to call it that we’ve tried to create. I don’t know what anyone will think when they hear it, but we know what we wanted to do with it. And I think it happened pretty good, the best that we can do.

SSv: What is the theme you’re trying to go for? You said some good songs got shelved because they didn’t fit, so what makes the cut and what doesn’t?

James: About a month into the process, we realized about halfway in that these songs we were writing were very thematic homogeny that we felt was very interesting. Everything seemed to be about the moments before a man dies and the loss and how people deal with that. I think that’s what we were going for. I don’t know if that comes across at all to anybody else in the world, but that’s what we were going for. It’s “Yonder is the Clock.” It’s the last moments of your life. That’s what we were going for. I read some reviews of the record that didn’t get that, but that’s fine. They got other things out of it.

SSv: What drew you to that theme – it seems like a deeper place to pull from?

James: Exactly. We wanted to tell interesting stories about things that we care about. And we’ve all lost someone close to us in the last couple of years and even in the recording process, there seemed to be something like that happening. We’re all young guys and death is something we don’t have to think too much about hopefully, but it’s there. You see it in the old folks you love and people pass on and we were curious about it and we wanted to try to express that.

SSv: What did you learn about it?

James: Nothing. [Laughs] It’s pretty much unknowable. It’s a drop of water in the sea. Unfortunately, the reason why people have to create art is that we don’t understand the world and we don’t understand what death means or what love is or any of these things. Art is just constantly trying to quantify and express the unquantifiable and inexpressible ideas a lot of the times. You can’t nail death in a song. You can’t do it. It just happens. It’s not something to talk about or write about or sing about. It just is. So you try to see a small angle of it and express a feeling or idea. That’s what you try to do.

SSv: In a way, I would think it would reveal something about the artist in trying to understand it or chase that idea down…

James: I do think so. It’s not like we were sitting around holding hands and having profound revelations. We don’t even talk about that shit amongst ourselves. It’s pretty unspoken. But I did walk away with some personal things. It follows you every day of your life. It’s important to be okay with talking about these things. It’s coming. It’ll get you somehow.

SSv: So I want to go back a bit, because you read these stories about playing in the subway and you realize that many times, it’s all PR fodder and the truth that’s been stretched one too many times. So how real is the subway playing background of the band?

James: No, that’s how we did it. We played subways and farmer’s markets in New York. We played a lot upstate where we grew up in local cities and towns and on the streets. But we were just down in the City three or four days ago playing in the subway. It’s definitely the way we started. It’s how we cut our teeth. We didn’t do it as long as a lot of other artists. People have been playing there for years and years and years. We were fortunate enough to catch a break – a guy just pulled us out of the street before we really became professional street musicians. It’s an art. It’s hard to do. I have so much respect for people doing it for years.

Playing in front of an audience of people who want to hear your songs and who know you and are psyched up and drunk, that’s easy. There’s a challenge there, but it’s easy compared to playing in the subway in front of a bunch of angry New Yorkers who don’t give a shit. But if you can make them stop and give them a little bit of music and make them happier and make some change, that’s some amazing feeling. We love doing that.

SSv: Best subway anecdote – good or bad?

James: [Laughs] Actually the other day, we were setting up in this spot in Penn Station and it seemed like a good spot. We heard this guy yelling at us and there was a cardboard box a little ways away – it was a homeless man sleeping in this box. He was trying to sleep and we were bothering him, so we packed up our shit and moved on. He had the spot first. So it’s things like that.

SSv: Why go back to that after playing festivals?

James: We’re trying to keep it real here. You gotta keep it real. You can’t become soft and just play a few shows a month and be actually good at your job. You have to keep going because if you get soft, then you fail. We can’t write any good music if we’re being lazy and just hanging out and drinking and screwing around. And we don’t even get down there as much as we should, but we try.

SSv: Can you feel that internal shift happening when you’re going soft?

James: I think so. You know, we haven’t had it too much because we’re still fuckin’ broke. I lived in a house without running water for six months, so it’s okay. If I thought I would getting cushy, we would all freak out and move to Mexico or something because we just don’t want to become lackadaisical about this whole thing. [Laughs]

Tagged as: Country, Folk, New York, Rock