Q&A: the Felice Brothers

The Felice Brothers are (left to right): fiddle player Greg Farley, bassist Josh “Christmas” Clapton, drummer Dave Turbeville, singer/guitarist Ian Felice, and keyboardist/accordion player James Felice (Credit: Fat Possum Records)

When they arrived on the national stage in late 2007, the Felice Brothers seemed like ambassadors for a new kind of musical primitivism. Hailing from the tiny upstate New York town of Palenville, the band played a rough-hewn style of folk-rock filled with fiddle, accordion and echoes of Woody Guthrie. The band members were self-taught on their instruments, and recorded their first record in a chicken coop. It was as if they had stepped out of the liner notes of a Smithsonian Folkways record.

So it may comes as something of a shock to fans that the band’s fourth album, “Celebration, Florida”—their first for Fat Possum Records, after amicably parting ways with Conor Oberst’s Team Love label—features synthesizers and drum machines. Even multi-instrumentalist James Felice was skeptical when his bandmates proposed the new direction—but he quickly came around.

“I realized almost right away how expressive and how interesting synthetic music can be,” Felice says. “There’s still a human being playing it, no matter what it is. You can play something as beautiful and as delicate on a computer as you can on a piano.”

Synths aside, “Celebration, Florida” remains very much a Felice Brothers album, full of the band’s rowdy barroom anthems, shambling waltzes and evocative lyrics—and yes, plenty of fiddle and accordion, too. The electronic elements just add some new textures—although one new track, "Ponzi," does flaunt something awfully close to a techno beat.

After catching up briefly with the full band at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas (read that interview here), Metromix checked back in with James Felice by phone to discuss the band’s latest album—and find out what he and his brother Ian have against a certain chain of major music venues.

When we saw you guys at South by Southwest, you played barefoot. Was that a one-time thing, or do you often go shoeless?
I don’t like wearing shoes very much. When I was younger and much more of a dirtbag, I would go whole weeks in the summertime without wearing shoes. I dunno, it feels good for some reason. When you stomp the stage, it’s a whole different feeling.

I know everyone’s talking about, with this new record: “Oh my god, they’re using synths! And drum machines!” But there’s some good old-fashioned foot stomping on this album, too.
Yeah, there really is. The record really has a similar feel to everything we’ve ever done, I think. It’s still raw and weird and honest. I think people like our early stuff, not because we’re playing an accordion or a banjo, but because of the way the music feels. We’re using synths the same way we would use a guitar or a foot-stomp or anything else. We’re just using them in a raw, kind of dirtbag way that we’ve always done.

You recorded “Celebration, Florida” in an old high school in Beacon, N.Y.—how did that come about?
It’s not the most interesting story. It was abandoned like 10 years ago or maybe more. It was a huge high school—like a quarter of a million square feet. Most of it was empty, but they rented out probably 20 or 30 rooms to different local artists. So there was a really nice artistic community there for a little while—painters, a bookbinder, there was a baker downstairs. We rented out basically like a whole hallway on the second floor. We’ve been there for like a year. It got bought by some rich guy—he’s sort of kicking everybody out. So we gotta leave, but it was really nice while it lasted.

Are all five guys in the band from New York’s Hudson Valley area originally?
Yeah, all of us grew up here, except for Dave, our drummer. Dave grew up in Florida. But the rest of us basically grew up within 20 minutes of each other. We’ve spent our whole lives here. I’ve never lived anywhere else, except down in the city, for a little while.

Right. You guys lived in New York City and busked on the subway for awhile.
Yeah. And now they call us a Brooklyn band. I see that in our show previews all the time: “Brooklyn-based Felice Brothers are playing in Knoxville” or wherever. Holy s---, we lived there for not that long.

I guess people know where that is—but if you say the town you and your brothers actually grew up in, no one knows what you’re talking about.
It’s near Woodstock, so people latch onto that a lot, too.

Speaking of geography: Why is the album named after a Disney-owned bedroom community in Florida?
Because it’s such a different place than where we grew up, this corporate town in Florida, which to people from New York is where New Yorkers go to die. We just became fascinated with that—we became fascinated with Walt Disney and his whole crazy vibe. You know, I grew up watching Disney films and I love Disney musicals for some reason. I dunno, it just felt like the right thing to call the record. And since the record is sort of new for us, we thought an incongruous name would be interesting.

I know Ian’s always done most of the band’s lead vocals, but you usually take a turn or two at the mic. But I didn’t hear you do any lead vocals on this album, did I?
No. I didn’t write any songs for this record. I wanted to work more on just arranging. I feel that Ian is such an amazing songwriter that unless I come up with something that’s really spectacular, I’m not gonna waste everybody’s time. And I’m really happy—I feel like this record has more of me in it than any of the other records. Even though I’m not the author of any of the songs, I feel like my musical contribution is strongest of this record.

On “River Jordan,” Ian cusses out several things, one of them being the House of Blues. What’s the story behind that?
We’ve played the House of Blues before, opening up for people, and the institution just seems despicable, to all of us. I mean, there’s good people working there, and they try, but…it’s just so corporate and anti-septic, but it’s also just so f---ing fake, because they try to make it feel like this old-timey blues café, like, “Oh my god, Skip James could walk in at any moment.” Rock ‘n’ roll—and I include folks and blues [in that]—it’s such an honest expression, and it can be so raw and meaningful. When you hear Neil Young play “Cowgirl in the Sand”—that’s real. It don’t get much more real than that. Or when you hear Skip James, or Mississippi John Hurt—that’s honesty. To me, that’s art, the most pure expression that a person can have in a lot of ways. But then the House of Blues just [craps] all over that. If you publish that, we’ll never get to play the House of Blues again, but I think we’ll be OK with that.