The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“I was not made for these times,” goes the lyric on ‘Christmas Song’ from The Felice Brother’s debut album, Tonight At The Arizona. No shit. A glance at the photographs on the sleeve reveals a rusty-looking bunch of desperados in coats and hats straight from a Billy The Kid flick, and the songs themselves are classic and moth-eaten - country-like, but not so much in sound. They tell stories of beaten prize fighters and lost men trying to cover the costs of life, and they do so with an old-time warmth.

The name is a give-away. Of the four full-time members, three are brothers and the other, Christmas, is their best pal. There you see it too - the dude’s name is Christmas, for Christ’s sake. And they say he used to be a travelling dice player.

A band of three brothers and one other singing hoary tales of the downtrodden and misplaced. So far, so Kings of Leon, but I’ve already read that you get a slap if you make the comparison to their faces, or if you suggest they’re a bit like The Band. They hate The Band comparison the most because, as you might expect, they do sound a bit like them and they grew up near Woodstock in upstate New York, where The Band cut The Basement Tapes with Dylan and Levon Helm still lives. They even supported Levon at a gig at his home last year.

Just quickly, Simone Felice, drummer, makes a good point about the relationship between upstate and New York City: “Our dad tore a barn down once and he found a dead body. So, in other words, whatever happens in Brooklyn and the city makes it up to where we grew up. A lot of artists move out to the country, because it’s close, cheaper to live and beautiful. Up and down the Hudson - there’s always been a connection.”

Let’s get something else straight: The Felice Brothers are a very modern band; they’re just in love with the history of American music. “We say it a lot,” says Simone, “but our dad was a carpenter - a craftsman - and we approach music the same way, in that we think of it as our craft. We think of the traditions of American music and poetry as being handed down to us, like the skills of a carpenter are handed down to him.”
Simone said that in response to a question that had nothing to do with what they sound like. It came at the end of a conversation about their ambitions and what they want to get out of their obvious dedication to songwriting and playing. “How many people are going to buy our table?” he continued. “Who knows. We just want to get real good at our craft.”

The Felice Brothers stink of ambition, and it comes across in both sweet and testing ways. On the one hand, accordion player James will say, “There’s been a lot of love for us from our heroes like Levon Helm, Conor [Oberst] and Gillian Welch, who we’ve met, and from people who come to the shows - it feels great, it really does,” but he’ll be followed by Simone, the eldest brother, who can be steely-eyed and forceful: “We have another record that we’ve made called Adventures of The Felice Brothers, Vol. 1. Do you have it? We’ll give you a copy and you can talk about some of those songs.”

It’s actually really fun. As you’d expect from a close-nit family band, there’s a lot noticeable body language that goes on between them in an interview situation. Chief singer and guitarist, Ian Felice, used our meeting to grab 40 winks. But was he sleeping? Was he fuck. “When you take your music to the American south, do you in any way feel like you’re selling sand to the Arabs?” I asked and Ian sprung from his ‘slumber’. “We don’t play southern music!” he roared. Easy tiger.

Another question about whether Rick Rubin was going to sign them caused a tumbleweed moment. Tom from their label in the UK - Loose Records, their only current label - was within ear-shot and all the brothers (except Ian) looked to Simone for permission to speak. (Christmas, by the way, wasn’t around for the interview and that’s Farley Felice, sometime fiddle player, in the pic with his brothers.)

Silence.

“Wait, you have played for Rick, right?”

Silence.

Simone, eventually: “Yeah, his scouts came from two different angles - from Columbia Records and American, the label he formed after he left Def Jam - and it was like, ‘Okay, cool. Wow.’ We were asked if we wanted to go to Malibu and play for Rick, so they flew us out and we were supposed to play five songs, but he ended up saying, ‘Play another one! Play another one! It was in this empty theatre with just these six dudes from his label and us there. We were out of our element, but it special. He took us for dinner and now he’s talking about signing us guys. So that’s one of the options that’s on the table for us and it’s one of the more exciting ones.”

I don’t mean to give them a hard time. They’re an unfailingly polite band and, in the end, it’s their ‘get the fuck off our porch’ gang mentality that makes them so likeable - to meet, and to see play. Live, they’re very different to how they seem on Tonight At The Arizona - rougher, drunker, more naked. This is a family band without blood harmonies and seamless cohesiveness. They deliver it raw and they’d play all night if they were given a chance. On their self-released latest record - the one Simone wants me to talk about - there’s a brilliant moment when a neighbour bursts in on session…

Neighbour: “I’ve got fucking kids down here trying to sleep! I’ve asked three times and you, you, and you ignored me.”

The Felices: “Wait a minute…”

Neighbour: “No! Not wait a minute! I’ve dealt with it all night - I don’t have a problem. Now it’s after midnight. Right!? You’ve got neighbours all around you. Fucking think about people!”

The Felices: “We apologise.”

You just pray they carried on. Onwards and upwards, Felice Brothers! Let it bleed.

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