Testing the boundaries of contemporary folk music is what The Felice Brothers do best.

These boys are sonic tinkerers—they put on lab coats, dive into an unconventional studio, and start mixing sounds like chemicals. They’ve transformed chicken coops and empty high schools into creative laboratories, and their instrumental experimentation has led to some explosive music in the indie folk scene.

Their newest album, Celebration, Florida, has been praised as their most deviant and imaginative yet. The innovative record combines synth lines, schoolyard chants, ambient noise, powerful bass lines, and blaring drum beats with dramatic changes, deep melodies, and skilled storytelling lyrics. The end result is an interwoven trail of organic characters within a haunting narrative akin to gothic novels or film noir, an emotionally exhilarating tale informed by a somewhat tortured nostalgia. With one listen, the audience is entranced within a world of haunted dance halls, decaying paradises, crumbling dreams, and disorienting pandemonium in the dark shadows of America.

From backyard barbecues, New York subway stations, and rickety barrooms to national tours and major music festivals, these brothers (Ian and James Felice) and their three brother-like companions (Christmas, Greg Farley, and David Turbeville) have come a long way from their hometown of Palenville in upstate New York, where they grew up together and founded the band in 2006. OffBeat talked with band member Greg Farley, who’s played washboard, violin, drum machine, and more in the Felice Brothers, about the new album, life on the road, unattainable utopias, recording in a desolate high school, and waking up to Alan Jackson.

 

You seem to switch instruments a lot, maybe the most out of the band members. What’s your history with different musical instruments and which one did you play the most for Celebration, Florida?

I started playing the violin when I joined the band, which is probably three and a half going on four years ago, and I started playing the drum machine when we began making this record, which I was about a year and a half ago, maybe two years. Those are the two instruments I play the most right now on stage and I recently started trying to learn the trumpet.

Why did you choose the violin initially?

Well at the time I was living in this town in upstate New York called Rosendale and there was this cute girl who lived down the road. She played violin and I only played guitar at the time, so we would play together, but she had an extra violin, her first one actually, so I told her, “Oh, I’d love to learn how to do that.” I just thought it would be a cool way to get to hang out with her.

And then when the boys, who I grew up with, knew that I was trying to learn to play the violin they asked if I wanted to play with them and that’s how that whole thing topped off.

You guys all grew up together, but you joined the Felice Brothers later. Did you witness the band getting started?

Yeah, because I used to hang out with them all the time. It started out just Simone, Ian, and James—they’re all brothers—and then they asked Christmas to join. I grew up with Christmas. We went to the same high school. Then they asked me join in after that, so they had been a band for almost two years before I joined. We all would play on the street a lot growing up, but I remember seeing those guys more than anybody around. When they initially got started they used to play everywhere. I’d see them all over the place, around where we lived or down in the city, in the subway. They’d get these gigs from playing in the street, like at restaurants and bars and sometimes they would ask me to open up for them.

When I joined the band it was summer time, and Simone and I would spend hours upon hours trying to get us shows all across the country. We bought this RV because we borrowed a bunch of money, which we still owe on this thing, but anyways, we took out a huge loan and just went out on the road to play. We had some shows booked, but if we didn’t, sometimes we would just stop in a town and play on the street and end up getting a gig from doing that. During that time, I really sucked. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t know how to play the violin at all, so I played at lot of washboard at that time. That was our first tour that we ever went on, and after that we got interest from these booking agents and were offered to go on tour with Bright Eyes and then after that, we opened for the Drive-By Truckers. When we opened for Drive-By Truckers, that’s when I was really full-time.

I bet you guys celebrated that day.

Yeah, when they offered the Bright Eyes thing that was just crazy. It was crazy how fast that happened because that was our first tour around the country and then all of sudden we get an offer to play for Bright Eyes, which, I mean Conor [Oberst, Bright Eyes leader] is huge now, but even at that time, I think it was 2007, the band had just come out with that Cassadaga album.

How old were you guys on that first tour?

At the time I was 20. Christmas I think was 18 or 19, Ian was 24 or 25, and James was 22, or something like that. We were all pretty young, but I mean, we’re still young.

How did the experience of starting out on the streets and subways influence the way you perform now?

Definitely through the energy and the way you really feel what you’re playing, because when you play on the streets you’re trying to create a crowd, you’re tying to get attention, and you can’t just stand there like “I’m a really cool guy, look at me.” That doesn’t work. You have to be really feeling what you’re doing, feeling yourself and feeling the music you’re playing. People are attracted to that, they want to see that, and then you start experiencing it with them, because on the street, you’re so close to people, so people usually get into it. They’ll be clapping and singing. I think we’ve definitely taken that to our shows, because at our shows we always try to create an experience with the audience. We want to be with the audience, we want the audience to be feeling what we’re feeling, and we love it when the audience gets into it. If it’s a sad song or a happy one, anything, we just want to crowd to take away some kind of feeling.

Is there anything you guys have changed about your public performances since going professional?

I think we are just getting better all the time. We’re getting tighter as a band and getting better at our instruments because we have more time to play them. That whole thing about connecting with people, with the audience, has always come naturally to us when we play music. We don’t really have to think about that, so we never really changed any of it. We just go up there and fucking give it up, go up there and give it our all, do our best and try to make everyone have a really good time.

Even when we opened for Dave Matthews, we used to be like “Oh shit, how are we going to connect with the crowd? It’s so far away.” But somehow we did. I really think we’ve been blessed with that natural ability to connect with people when we get in front of a crowd.

It seems like you guys combine a lot of musical influences, so there’s often something there for everyone to relate to.

Oh yeah, and you have a lot of different personalities on stage too. I’m very outward and kind of loud, but Christmas is more subdued. I feel like there’s somebody for everyone.

What feelings go through your head when you’re on stage in front of the crowd?

I always feel simply blown away in a lot of ways. Even in small towns—like last night when we played in Lubbock, Texas and there was probably about 80 people there—even that is crazy, when you can just go to a town where you’ve been only once or maybe never been there at all and there’s a group of people. I guess you feel lucky, and at the same time you have to go out there and perform and do a great job because you want people to feel happy and be satisfied, especially these days. It’s just crazy to me that people even have money to attend shows. Everyone I know back home is hurting, so that’s why when people come out to see us, we don’t take that lightly—we want them to forget about all their troubles. We want them to have the best time they’ve ever had for two hours and leave feeling like they’ve experienced something.

The band is a popular booking on the festival circuit. Do you have a preference for indoor or outdoor venues?

Either way, we don’t really have our preferences. Our only preference is that we just want to play shows, so if there’s a show, we’ll come do it. But it’s awesome to be outside, because you’ve got the fresh air and the sun. We’ve definitely played in all kind of crazy weather conditions. I remember one time we played in Camden [New Jersey] and the sun was going down. It really set the mood. Another time we played in Newport and there was this crazy storm and we had to play acoustic. We’ve had all kinds of crazy stuff happen to us playing outside. We’ve played at barbecues back in the day. After South by Southwest, we got invited to this woman’s house and it was just all these local people and that was really fun.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u054VK33gc0[/youtube]

On Celebration, Florida, which just came out in May, you guys seem to deviate from convention beyond the innovative standards you yourselves previously established. What makes it most different from your other albums?

The biggest difference is the development. The way we did the songs was completely different, because a lot of them weren’t finished when we went to the studio. We just finished them all as we were recording them so a lot of them have crazy dips and dives and changes. Also, sonically, the way the record sounds is a lot different than our older records because there was a lot of mixing of live recording, and we have a lot of overdubs, and obviously we used a lot of different instruments, like synths and drum machines on this album.

That’s the only thing that I can say is really different because I think the songwriting, the emphasis on the lyrics, and the storytelling is still there. The album just shows off different sounds and we recorded it in a different space. We were in the high school, a place where we’ve never recorded before, and so we had the run of the mill of all these different rooms to get all these different sounds. Previously, we’ve mostly done all of our recording at this chicken coop in our hometown—I mean, there weren’t any chickens in there or anything; it was an old chicken coop that we renovated.

Tell me about the high school. You guys obviously like to record in unconventional studios.

Yeah, you’re right, come to think of it. We’ve never really recorded in a regular studio. The high school thing was crazy because a lot of work went in to just moving in there and setting everything up. I think we thought we’d have that place for a lot longer, but they ended up selling the high school.

When you’re in a high school, there’s so much nostalgia. And it was really spooky, especially at night, because you always associate a school with when you were young and there were always people there, but when we were there, no one was ever there and it was just weird. It was like ghosts, spooky and weird, but it was deep and it was fun.

I think a lot of people get that feeling from this album, at least I did—that kind of haunted, somewhat spooky vibe. Was that strongly influenced by your location, or did you guys begin making the album with that sound in mind?

I think it was also inspired by the songs Ian was writing at the time. He wrote a lot of those in the winter, and upstate New York in the winter time is dark, cold and weird. And like you said, being in the school and trying to get deeper with our sound, what we thought was cool, what we thought sounded awesome, what was resonating with us at that time is exactly what you hear. When we record we just mix stuff until it feels really good and we reach that moment where we think, “Oh okay, that’s right. That’s it!”

What song on the new album do you see as the band’s most creative leap?

Probably “Fire at the Pageant” and “River Jordan”. “River Jordan” is a really deep, long, crazy ride. “Fire at the Pageant” is definitely a very unconventional take on a song in the way it was written, the lyrics, and the instrumentation. I feel like those songs are really pushing it. They represent a good combination of our development.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsQXUJk3m4[/youtube]

Does the whole band contribute to the songwriting process?

Usually someone brings in the initial skeleton of a song, and that’s typically the guy singing the song, but everything you start to hear around it is created by all of us, all the added parts are a collaborative effort from the beginning. That was the big thing about this new record. Usually it’s like, “Okay, here’s the song start to end,” but this time it was more like, “Okay, I have a piece here, I got a riff here,” or, “Oh, I got a couple of lyrics here,” and then all of us keep making it up as we’re recording it. It’s kind of crazy, and that’s why I think it took so long. It wasn’t like we had every song nailed down and just ran to the studio to record it. We went to the studio and made it.

There’s been a lot of discussion about why you guys titled the album Celebration, Florida because it’s a real, but somewhat imaginary setting in America, so what was the actual reasoning behind that name?

I think the title was chosen because a lot of the people in the stories and a lot of the themes going on in the album are about trying to create your own paradise and not really being able to obtain that, and we just felt like that place was a good example of trying to create this dreamscape utopia bullshit. And also the fact that it’s sort of creepy. When we heard of this place we all thought it was kind of creepy, weird, and thought “why would you ever do that?” A lot of the themes in the songs are just about these people trying to create their own paradise and not being able to make that happen and the album deals with questions like, “What is paradise and is that possible? Does perfection exist?” It’s a common theme in most American writing.

Where do you guys get your ideas for these experimental, unexpected sounds? Did you just play around in the building or did you just see something and say, “Oh I bet this would sound interesting, let’s see what it sounds like?”

That’s kind of it actually, how you said it right there. It’s kind of like, “Oh, maybe this will sound cool?” and then we try it because there are really no restrictions. We have a nice dynamic. Everyone feels really comfortable throwing whatever they think might be cool out there, and even if it gets shot down, none of us ever take it that hard. We all have different influences from all different types of genres, so I think that’s where a lot of weird stuff comes in because we all listen to so many different types of music and get ideas from so many different places. Somehow those influences formulate in your mind and you start hearing a song and ask yourself, “Well, what would I want to get out of this song? What would I think is cool, what would I resonate with, what can I put into it?” And you try to do whatever is best for the song, whatever you think would add to it without taking anything away or getting too much attention. You don’t want to put something too crazy in it because the most important parts of the song are the lyrics and the vocal melody.

What would you say is you favorite eccentric sound on the album?

I love all the synth lines and all the crazy changes, especially in Cus’s Catskill Gym”. It originally had this crazy, super deep, super heavy beat at the beginning, but we ended up taking it out because there were just too many crazy changes in the song, but I love how it goes from the super heavy to that almost punky part. That song has so many different looks, but its got one feeling.

You guys are a little more than mid-way through your tour. Is there any particular performance that stands out to you as the most memorable?

Webster Hall [in New York City] was crazy. It was an awesome show. Personally, I wouldn’t say it was my favorite night because our manager stepped on my fiddle and broke it mid-show, but as a band I’d say it was everyone’s favorite. It was awesome because a lot of our family and friends were there, it was packed, and it was definitely one of the biggest crowds, at least on this tour, and it was in New York. James’ and Ian’s grandpa had just passed away a couple of weeks before that, so their whole family came out. It was the complete opposite of a funeral.

You guys are performing Thursday, November 10 at Tipitina’s with Dr. Dog, but you guys have performed here before. What have you come to expect from the New Orleans crowd?

Yeah, we’ve performed in New Orleans tons of times. We love that town. The New Orleans crowd has always been super sweet to us. I remember our first show was at the Maple Leaf. It was our first time in New Orleans and people were already going crazy. Last time we were there I think we played at One Eyed Jacks, and that was a really great show too. It was a weird day of the week, not really a party night, but it was still a great show. When we look at the calendar and see we’ve got a show in New Orleans we know it’s going to be a good one and we always get super psyched to play. I’m psyched to just go up there and kill and warm up the Dog.

You guys are constantly on the road, so how do you keep up your energy level up. What’s the motivation behind this relentless work ethic? Why don’t you guys want to take a break?

Because we just love it. I know that’s corny, but it’s true. We love playing music. We love playing together. We love traveling together. We really want to do this. We want to take this to the highest level we can go, discover how great we can be, and we believe that we can keep getting better all the time. When you’re on tour you really feel like you’re working towards the whole cause, it just puts it in more perspectives because it’s every day. When we’re home, we practice together, but it’s not as intense. When you’re on tour, everything feels a lot more extreme, the highest highs, the lowest lows, everything is to the max. We love this band and we all put everything we have into it. All of us, we didn’t work any other jobs. Even when we first started out, we just said “Fuck everything. We’re just going to do this. This is all we’re going to do and we’re going to try to be the best at it.” Making the band your first priority and always being as real and as true as you can to the band and the music is a big thing to us.

What kind of music do you guys like to listen to when you’re on the road?

We haven’t been listening to that much music. We listen to a lot of NPR, books on tape, shit like that. Usually the guy who’s driving picks out the music, but lately I haven’t been hearing that much music coming from the front. It’s usually just rolling to silence or it’s some Terry Gross interview with Brad Pitt about Moneyball. Actually, the latest interview we listened to was about Steve Jobs because the book about his life just came out and [Fresh Air] interviewed the author. We listen to a lot of blues like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Skip James. When Ian drives he’s usually got a lot of Skip James going. I usually have stuff like [New York hip-hop and R&B radio station] Hot 97 when I’m driving. I’ve been rocking to ASAP Rocky, that new mixtape. Lately, I’ve been busting that out. Christmas plays all kinds of stuff. He’s usually co-pilot and he’s very classic, so he plays a lot of Miles Davis. He’s got all kinds of shit going on. We have so many different tastes in music, but we also have a lot of stuff that we all agree that we love.

Do you have a special alarm to wake you up in the morning?

On tour my alarm is usually having to take a pee. You wake up thinking, “Where am I going to pee? Where am I? What parking lot are we in?” because we sleep in the RV all the time. So usually that’s what wakes you up. At home, I always wake up to pop country radio. I don’t know why, but I love waking up to pop country. I love waking up and Taylor Swift is singing about something or Alan Jackson is just telling me about some shit.

Yeah, I grew up in Louisiana so I definitely feel you on the Alan Jackson.

Oh yeah? My grandparents are from the Bronx, straight up, but they love Alan Jackson. I even used to barback country night at this club in New Paltz, [New York] and they do the line dancing and everything. You probably didn’t think you’d find that in New York, but we’ve got everything up there.

The Felice Brothers keep redefining Americana and folk conventions and pushing the boundaries further and further with each new album. What can we expect from you guys next?

Man, that’s like the hardest question ever to answer. Really, who knows what we’re going to be listening to at that time? Who knows what we’re going to be wanting to achieve? I think we are going to make a record as soon as we get off of this tour, actually. I think we are going to go home, write, make a record, and then go on tour again. What you can expect is that the songs are always going to have a solid melody, a great story, great characters, and a lot of emotion, something you can really feel—that’s always going to be a part of the Felice Brothers. As far as what those are going to be dressed up with, what kind of swag those songs are going to be coming out in, who knows? You’re just going to have to wait and see.