[From the Ithaca Times] Some bands work together like a family, but the Felice Brothers really are a family. The Palenville-based folk-rock quintet — which includes three of the seven Felice children, Simone, Ian and James — will perform this Thursday, April 24, a show hosted by Rootabaga Boogie Productions.
Palenville, a small town in the Catskills only 20 minutes from Woodstock, remains home to this tight-knit group of musicians, and they don’t plan on moving anytime soon. “I think about moving sometimes, but after being away for two months touring, when I’m home, I feel like I’m home,” James told me from his house in Palenville. “I grew up here and spent my whole life here, and this past tour was the longest I’ve ever been away. I’m a country boy and mountain boy at heart, and I can’t really see myself living in the city or anywhere else, at least for now.”
Indeed, the group’s been on the road a lot lately, having recently ended a tour with former emo poster boy-turned-winsome country songwriter, Bright Eyes. “The tour was so amazing,” James recalls. “It was a big step up for all of us, to suddenly play for 2,000 people instead of 200. It was crazy, but wonderful, too, and we knew that we had to step it up and just play. At first, I think we thought that it was going to be a lot harder than it really was, like, ‘Holy crap, what are we going to do up there?’ But once we’re on stage, it’s like any other place — if it’s good, people will enjoy it, whether it’s 10 people or 1,000 people.”
Not only did they come away with road experience, but the tour resulted in the group signing with Conor Oberst’s record label, Team Love, where they eventually released their full-length album The Felice Brothers last month.
There’s a good reason why they’ve spent so much time out on the road. The Felice Brothers — who perform raucous, ramshackle music heavily indebted to American performative traditions of porch playing, busking, and backyard parties — have developed a synergenic, slightly wild approach to the live concert. “I have to say, it’s generally always fun to play in a bar, with people drinking, happy and rowdy. It’s always a good time,” James laughs.
Having formed in 2006, the Felice Brothers are following in the footsteps of well-worn old time folk and roots rock traditions — a path that has experienced a revival of sorts recently, thanks to acts like the Avett Brothers, Sun Volt, and the Drive By Truckers — but they bring a modern sensibility of cheekiness and irreverence.
“We were doing various things [at the time], but not much. Bumming around mostly; some were living in a tent, I was living in my car — playing music, but obviously not very successfully,” James laughs. “We finally figured it all out, and it was like, it was staring us in the face! We would play music together, and it just clicked.”
The Felice offspring grew up listening to the classics — Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young — but their own music is an organic marriage of major influences The Band and traditional Hudson Valley songs. Despite more than one critic dubbing them Bob Dylan-lite, James insists that they’ve always sought to stay true to themselves.
“Hopefully, in the end, people just like good music. Journalists write you up as who and what you sound like, your influences and the kind of music you play. But as Ray Charles said, ‘There’s two kinds of music, there’s good music, and then there’s bad music,’” James laughs. “Hopefully we’re just good music. And that’s all that matters.”
“At the end of the day, you listen because you enjoy music. People can miss the point of us a lot, but it doesn’t really matter. ‘Americana’ and ‘alt-country’ or ‘folk rock’ — those don’t mean anything to me, because I listen to almost anything — Chopin, Bob Dylan, Ghostface Killah. It doesn’t matter,” James says. “My influences are everything, and when you play music, you really are the sum of your influences — plus a little something special.”
And today, when issues of authenticity are at stake, and narratives are fabricated to create a veil of legitimacy, the Felice Brothers have remained nothing if not honest to their rowdy, mountain boy selves. They have no ambitions other than playing the music they’re familiar with, and channeling their influences with nod and a wink.
“This is on our own terms. The press may say we’re like Bob Dylan, but it doesn’t matter to me. It’s not my job — my job is to play music. You can’t look outside of yourself too much; you don’t want to look at the big picture and the labels they give you. At the end of the day, my job is being in a band, and to not care what people think,” James says.
2008 will be The Felice Brothers’ busiest year yet. After some scattered live gigs this spring, they’ll spend most of the summer writing and recording their next record, which they hope will be released on Team Love by next winter.
The Felice Brothers will perform at Castaways this Thursday, April 24 at 8pm. Judy Hyman and Richie Stearns of The Horseflies will open.