*The Felice Brothers are a folk rock/country rock band from upstate New York founded in 2006. It is comprised of the five main members Ian Felice (lead vocals, guitar, piano), Simone Felice (drums, vocals, guitar), James Felice (accordion, piano, organ) and their friend Christmas (bass), previously a traveling dice player. They have been joined by Farley, a washboard player and fiddler, and others who at times had a horn section to the band. The three brothers are from the Catskill Mountains of New York. They hail from Palenville, NY, twenty minutes from Woodstock.
The three brothers began playing together on Sunday afternoons at their father’s barbecues but the band started when they moved to a little apartment in Brooklyn and began to play at the Subway stations near 42nd. Street and Union Square in Greenwich Village.
They released their debut album Through These Reins and Gone in 2006 and in 2007 they got a deal with Loose Music in Europe. Through These Reins and Gone made it onto Radio Woodstock WDST’s top 25 albums of 2006. The Felice Brothers have played at Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble in Woodstock, NY, toured with Bright Eyes played at the 2008 Clearwater Festival, and Bonnaroo in Manchester, TN.
A Personal View of The Felice Brothers
Scruffy wanderers who just happened to find some instruments.
Dirtbags capturing lightning and spinning it into harvest gold. That’s what you’re holding in your hands right here.
“Dirtbags” because the Felice Brothers (three of them – Ian, Simone and James – brothers of blood, with dice-throwing bassist Christmas adopted in as blood brother) are the type of guys who, no matter how much you wire-brush scrub them, will never clean up entirely. I’ve personally never seen them without a little bit of dust or grime somewhere upon all of their persons, and having gotten to know them, I know for a fact that it’s hard won. The Felice Brothers live and travel as a unit. Their main mode of transportation is what we call in America a “short bus,” a miniature school transport usually reserved for the kind of kids that sometimes need to wear helmets just because. The Felice Brothers’ short bus is battered and wheezing, but it runs. It’s cluttered with stained dress shirts, holey vests, suits shiny with age and wear, and punch-drunk hats, all of which finds their way on various Felice body parts at any given time. While in transit or simply sitting parked in a haze of smoke and talk, Faulkner and Dostoevsky paperbacks, passengers, guests and paramours sit on whisky boxes, or instrument cases containing accordions or dented drums. It’s a good feeling.
They’re a bunch of slouching Hudson River pirates, the Felice Brothers are. They’re natives of the same wooded portion of Upstate New York that was the sometimes physical and always mythical home of The Band. They charm like a snake oil salesmen in a 19th-century medicine show; they stomp the boards like spirit-filled preachers; they close their eyes when they croon their imperfect (and therefore paradoxically perfect) Catskill Mountain harmonies; they smile wickedly when they drop into a groove; they bring a little bit of that front porch feeling with them wherever they go, even when they’re not playing; they watch the Nashville skyline with bemusement.
They’re a harvest festival, a late-night meal of greasy roast chicken and a stolen bottle of red wine shared with friends, and a woozy summer night filled with the promise of love, danger, barbecue and fireworks, all rolled into one.
All of that is in the vinyl of this record you’re holding right here. As is the lightning. How do I figure? I figure literally. On track three, what you may be thinking is a glitch in the recording of “Hey Hey Revolver” is nothing of the sort. Your record is fine. What you’re hearing is literally lightning hitting the ad hoc studio the band was recording in at the time (a leaky, abandoned Shakespeare theatre). No fooling. And that’s the Felice Brothers all over – imperfect and rough in an age of false perfection and polish. Their edges aren’t smooth; their clothes (and their voices, and their instruments) are tattered, threadbare and frayed. And they’re all the more golden and beautiful for it.
— Gabe Soria of Vice Magazine/February, 2007
