Though his family band The Felice Brothers originally earned a reputation for partying that rivaled their ability to write deep, honest, folk songs, Simone Felice has always been a sensitive soul. A far cry from his days as a self-described “lonely” child spending his free time at the library, he’s also grown into something of a lynchpin connecting The Felice Brothers with The Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, Dawes, Old Crowe Medicine Show, and the many other increasingly popular bands that blur the lines between classic Americana and modern rock. As the oldest of three Felice Brothers, Simone first rose to prominence playing drums and helping out on the songwriting front in his family band, but after his girlfriend suffered a miscarriage in 2009, he struck out on his own. Writing through his grief, he used his first batch of songs to ignite the equally honest, Huck Finn-inspired folk-rock band Duke & the King with George Clinton collaborator Robert “Chicken” Burke—and completed a critically acclaimed full-length novel. After he suffered another health scare—Felice had an aneurysm as a child that left him clinically dead for moments—the multi-instrumentalist looked even deeper inside and started work on his first full-length solo album. Shortly after the release of self-titled Simone Felice, the Woodstock, NY-based singer, songwriter, author and multi-instrumentalist discussed the emotional circumstances that spurred his solo career.
When we spoke last, you mentioned that you wrote the music on your recent solo album while you were going through two very emotional situations: your wife was pregnant but you were also facing some serious health scares. Can you start by giving us a little background about what was going on at the time you started working on Simone Felice ?
Well, in early June 2010 I was overseas in the middle of a little solo tour. I collapsed while walking up seven flights of stairs in a hotel and crashed in the hallway. When I woke up I kind of crawled to my room and I called my mom—it was my instinctual move to call my mom. I told her, “I think there is something wrong with my heart”— I knew inside there was something wrong. I never go to the doctor, and I don’t have insurance—I just go with the flow and am bad about that. I was born with this congenial heart defect, so I flew home the next day after my last show and they drove me to an Albany, NY medical center. The doctors all piled in the room and looked at my heart on the screen. The doctors kind of whispered to each other and said, “Mr. Felice, there is no medical reason for why you are still alive—we need to get you into heart surgery tomorrow. The aortic valve in your heart is closed up, and it is a wonder you didn’t die in the airplane or on stage.”
So I just had to give my body over to the great, big Indian in the sky and they wheeled me away. They dropped me under the knife—I had to say goodbye to my wife and her eight-month pregnant belly, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to see our first child. I survived—thank the gods of wind and weather and rock and roll. I was supposed to be in the hospital recovering for a month but I had the great fortune to have a cousin who was a nurse at the Albany Medical Center and she sort of broke me out of the recovery room two days after the surgery so I could recover at home in the mountains with the fresh air. I don’t know about anyone else, but the hospital the last place you want to be when you are recovering.
So luckily I got to heal up at home and, as Neil Young says, I was helpless, helpless, helpless. I couldn’t take care of myself or lift anything for about a month. I was on heavy doses of morphine—they were giving me these waking nightmares, weird visions and dreams. I wrote it all down and a lot of those ideas and nightmares became the songs on this album. And also the joyful songs inspired by my daughter Peal being born. She was born a month after the surgery, and I was just strong enough to pick her up. We had her at home in the mountains with a midwife, and I was just strong enough to pick her up out of the water. It was the most magical and transcendental moment of my life. I was given a new chance at life with basically a new heart and then was able to witness once of the most beautiful beings coming into the world. I cut the cord and looked her in the eye and knew she came from a better world than this. She is here to teach me. So this album is the culmination of those nightmares and those beautiful redemptive visions as well.
After going through such an emotion time, did you feel more confident about releasing an album under your own name instead of with The Duke & the King or your brothers?
Honestly Michael, I have been so privileged to be a writer, a player, part of some special records with my brothers—I was on the Avett Brothers’ record I have gotten to be a part of these great bands’ albums. But after the surgery there was something in my head
There’s always been a whispering on what to do—what path to take artistically and spiritually. Something really told me it’s time to tell my own story. My brothers have given their full blessing and been behind me all the way. We did about three or four songs together for my new album—they have a studio at an abandoned high school in Beacon, New York that is amazing. We got to record there in the round all live—it was the original configuration of the band with me on the drums.
Where did you record the rest of the album?
We recorded a lot of it in my barn—it was really naked and lonely, right after I could start to sing again. The first thing I did was set up the mic and try to catch the purity of the moment of the songs that were coming out. And then I did two songs with my friend Ben Lovett from Mumford & Sons. We recorded “Give Me All You Got” in my barn in Woodstock—he was up here with me for a couple of weeks. And then he invited me to a space he works at in London last spring. When I got there it was such a treat because—though I didn’t know until I got there—it was where The Traveling Wilburys made their records. The first tape I ever got was a Traveling Wilburys album—my father bought me in Leeds, so those records are kinda magical to me.
We worked in this old little church in the south end of London, alongside the ghosts of Roy Orbison and George Harrison. It was a really special place, and we recorded the song “You and I Belong” there. Ted Dwane came by to play a little and our friend Hillbilly Harry came to play some banjo on a song I wrote the day after Pearl was born. It’s a song about living in the moment, each morning. I wrote it really lonely and naked, but we kinda turned it into a hillbilly dance party—a celebration of life. I’m really happy about the way it came out.
Between your work with Mumford & Sons, Dawes, The Avett Brothers and your own family band, you are definitely at the center of the neo-folk scene. It almost feels like Rolling Thunder Revue, where whomever is in town will come up and play.
It’s a great fortune that that has happened. There’s a real community of great songwriters and players that have come from similar schools and we all respect one another and are inspired by each other. There’s a great line that Thom Yorke says [in “The Bends”], “I wish it were the ‘60s. I wish I could be happy.” I always felt like he meant he wishes he was a part of the magical moment of years and records and songs. I know how he feels. I used to feel that way a lot, but it’s almost come around in a new kind of way these days. I feel like we’ve got our own time. This is our moment. This is our era, our age—after the time that the towers fell, and this time of over saturation of technology, the end of communication and information. I feel like people are searching for something more pure and something more romantic and something more pure. If the songs we can make these days, the bands you mentioned that worked that album, we could make something that feels more real and pure. I think that it’s a beautiful thing.
Speaking of the Traveling Wilburys, you mentioned that they were a band your dad played for you. Since you are tapped into so many different styles of music and all your brothers ended up becoming musicians, are there certain bands your father played for you that you hear in your music? Or, conversely, do you see your music as a reaction to what your grew up listening to?
Yeah, absolutely. I was born an echo away from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—sort of at that moment of music—The Beatles and Dylan. And I grew up in a town where I could ride my bicycle past Big Pink—all those echoes were just omnipotent. My father, he listened to Dylan, Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, and The Band. And my mom loved Joni Mitchell and Carole King. This was the first music I ever heard so it’s deep inside of me, and I’ll never be able to shake it. I’m really thankful for that I was born in that moment. The first things I heard on the radio were unbelievable: unbelievable songs and these great albums. A lot of that stuff was medicinal and healing. My mom had a hard time when I was a little kid and our Dad ran away. And she would listen to Joni Mitchell’s Blue over and over. I know to this day it kind of it was a great balm to her. It really helped her and our little family at the time. Music has always been more than just noise on the radio. It’s been a healing thing, really like a lifestyle for me and my family.
I had a punk rock band when I was 17-18. I kinda quit school, and we would drive down and play a Tuesday night at CBGB’s at one o’clock in the morning for like 12 people. When my brothers and I first started coming down we played Banjo Jim’s and Pete’s Candy Store, and we played in the subways as everyone knows. And we played in the street and the farmer’s markets and wherever they wouldn’t kick us out of.
As you said, you grew up outside Woodstock, NY, the cradle of American folk-rock, in an area that has fostered artists and hippies for generations. Yet you had your first success with The Felice Brothers and with the Duke & the King oversees in England. That trajectory also seems to echo the ‘60s, where all these US artists had success oversees first.
Yeah, I think that’s true. I also think you can’t really…that you never know how the cookie is gonna crumble or where your music or poetry is going to strike a chord. A great story that always sticks with me: My friend was a kid in the mid ‘60s, and he went to see his favorite band the Monkees. And there was this weird guy with an afro playing a left-handed guitar and they booed him off-stage—this was in Long Island. They booed Jimi off the stage and a few years later he moved to London, England and he put together the Experience. And it was there that people started to pay attention to him. So you never know where people are going to resonate with your art work. And with any luck, it’ll spread, especially on a global whirl these days.
I know in addition to being a songwriter and musician you are also a novelist. Can you talk about the process of writing a song vs. a novel? Do you have different approaches?
For me the essence of what The Felice Brothers always did from the very beginning had to do with storytelling. I was lucky enough to grow up as a kid before the internet. I had to walk down to the library in our little town and take out books—it was kind of a lonely childhood in a lot of ways. I would take out John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Robert O’Connor and the characters that they would paint would just come alive to me in front of my eyes. They would make me feel not so lonely. I feel like storytelling has always been at the core of what we do—whether it be songs or writing prose. They’re two very different crafts, medium, they’re completely different disciplines. I feel like two trees standing next to each other are the same wood so they are separated by distance, but they share the same rain, the same sunlight and where they come together is in the root, the core. Underground the roots mingle and bleed. So I’ve written songs that I’ve loved the characters in the song so much that I had to write a short story about it. It’s really about the characters, the people that come to life. I’ve always, since I was kid, reading in the library, I’ve needed to populate my own little work with these people in a small attempt to fight loneliness.
Are you working on any long-form fiction at this point?
The novel, Black Jesus, just came out. I’ve worked on that for five years on and off—in The Felice Brothers touring van, on an airplane here and there, sitting by the creek…you know, wherever I could have a piece of paper and write down ideas. It took me about five years to write the book. So I just finished up with that and it’s out now. It’s a story about a marine, an American marine, who just came home from Iraq and he’s blinded. It was inspired from a friend of mine who fought over there. He came home with wounds, but the kind that you can’t see. Sometimes those are the worst kind of wounds. It’s a story about America—about how love is the greatest medicine. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a witness to that in my own life. I think if I didn’t have love around me and my family and my good people I might not be here. It’s really a story about how love can save your life. So that’s just out. I’m writing notes for a new story, but if writing books are like the tortoise and the hare I’m definitely the tortoise. It takes me a while for it all to come to life and I don’t wanna write one word that I feel I don’t really need.
