A cast of beautiful losers – drifters, weirdos and loners – brings Simone Felice’s music to life. Here, he talks to Betty Wood about his attachment to the shadows, and how this has influenced his music and writing
It’s an unusually cold spring morning as I arrive at the Marie Lloyd pub in East London to meet Simone Felice. I’m a little early, and as our photographer begins setting up his camera, Felice walks through the door dressed in a heavy mid-length, double-breasted black pea coat. He has a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck and a black woolen fisherman’s hat pulled low over his recently shaven head. It’s probably not quite the weather he was expecting for April in London, but he seems well prepared nonetheless.
Words Betty Wood
Photography Janne Tuunanen.“Do I need my guitar?” he asks the PR assistant, before setting it down in a leather booth. Despite being indoors, there’s little change in temperature and he rubs his hands, taking in the surrounds.“Great” he exclaims, eyes scanning the large lounge with its open-plan arrangement and wooden flooring. He taps his foot, testing the acoustics.
Our interview offers no opportunity for him to take his guitar out – he’s filming an acoustic set for another publication later – instead, he asks for a black tea and offers out his now free hand as greeting. “I’m Simone,” (pronounced Simon) he says, unassumingly. We’re led over to the far side of the room where there are two old Chesterfield sofas arranged beneath a light well, facing each other. “Shall I sit here?” he asks, pointing to the sofa opposite where I perch.
“Wherever you’d feel most comfortable”, I tell him, as he plops himself down next to me, leaning back into the jam of the settee.
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Felice is in the UK touring to promote his debut solo-album (released at the beginning of the month), and although he’s only been here a few days, he’s already clocked up over a month of tour dates, television and radio appearances and interviews back home in the States. Although tired – he hasn’t quite kicked off the remnants of jetlag – he’s philosophical as we talk about his career.
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As for so many artists, Felice’s work is tied closely to his personal experience of the world, and he’s had more than his fair share of ‘life-altering events’. In 1989, at the age of 12, Felice suffered a massive brain haemorrhage: after surgeons were forced to remove part of his brain, young Simone was left unable to read, write or play music as he had to relearn the basic of skills he’d taken for granted. The scar – running above his ear and disappearing at the back of his skill – is visible when he removes his hat and serves as the only physical testament to Felice’s first near-death experience.
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Two summers ago, he was back under the surgeons’ knife after being hospitalised, having suffered a complete coronary failure – an unexpected complication of his childhood illness – which gave him the scar that zips down the centre of his chest, just above his naval. If Felice’s life has been peppered by dramatic (and sometimes, the tragic), then the cast of his songs are similarly scarred with the darker seeds of society.- “Growing up, I lived in a very small town of about 1,000 people,” he explains. “I would take out books from the library by Charles Dickens, Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck, and the characters that were in these stories would spring to life in front of my eyes. The fiends and heroines and runaways and weirdos that they would paint would really help me to not feel so lonely.”It’s a lesson Felice has employed in his own work: “Poetry and story telling is really at the core of what I do – I’ve been creating these characters in an attempt to fight loneliness, and whether it’s a song, poem or book, it all comes form the same roots.” Felice’s songs feature a cast of itinerants, loners and shadowy types, from opening track Hey Bobby Ray – an uncomfortable narrative of physical abuse and portrait of its perpetrator that rings out with the chorus “Hey Bobby Ray – you got it comin’ boy, you’ll get your day” – to The New York Times, where injustice and current affairs are enacted through the pages of the newspaper.
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Above: In 1989, at the age of 12, Felice suffered a massive brain haemorrhage; a scar runs from above his ear to the base of his skullWhat is it that draws him to write about these incongruent members of society? He replies with weight: “The beautiful losers seem to be the most interesting people, the people on the margins of society, they’re in the shadows; shadows have always been very alluring to me.” Felice lists his literary influences – ranging from the Beats to contemporary writers Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Cohen – and pays particular attention to The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. A story about a heroine addicted world war two veteran who becomes a card dealer in Las Vegas, Felice points to this as “one book that really inspired me to be a writer. Algren said something along the lines ‘If these losers and these weirdos are not accepted in our society – or if they are damned, or pushed to the corners – then we damn ourselves as a society, because we’re all one really’. It inspired me a lot.”
- Felice’s professional career has been dedicated to giving these marginalised characters a voice, and in turn, being true to his own ambitions: “I made a promise to myself over the past few years. After my heart surgery – I almost died – I woke up, I survived. Three weeks later, my daughter Pearl was born. I picked her up, looked her in the eye, and from that moment I promised myself I’d sing with the truest voice, the truest melodies I could sing with.” That voice is one of the most highly esteemed of New York’s folk scene, with Felice having fronted the Felice Brothers (with brothers Ian and James) and The Duke & The King (named after the Shakespearean traveling tricksters in Mark Twain’s American classic Huckleberry Finn). Indeed Felice’s musical odyssey has been as equally eventful as his personal life, having started out as a teenager fronting a punk band, before turning to spoken word and eventually his own brand of Americana folk. “Like most teenagers, I was angsty.I had the great fortune, or misfortune – however you want to say it – of being 15 years old when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. The grunge punk world really inspired me when I was a kid: Fugazi; The Pixies – I loved that kind of music.
“Folk music isn’t just a dude with an acoustic guitar and harmonica”
I loved the old hard rock like Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd. And I grew up listening to the music of the 1960s – my father was an old hippie, the first music I ever heard was Bob Dylan; Joni Mitchell; Neil Young. That music is inside of me – when I was a kid I branched out and rocked out for a little while. But then I returned to the roots – I always return to the roots.”
These influences sound out through Felice’s own music – what Poe, Whitman, Hemingway and McCarthy are to Felice’s written work, Dylan, Young Mitchell and Sandy Denny –“she’s one of my favourite folk artists” – are to his music. And whilst for some ‘folk’ is a ‘dirty’ word, for Felice “hip hop is folk music; true punk is folk music.It’s what the folks are feeling at that moment – it’s storytelling essentially, whether it’s the Sex Pistols of Wu Tan Clan. That’s the music of the street – that’s what people are whispering; that’s what people are talking about on the park bench or in a closed apartment somewhere.It’s folk music. Folk music isn’t just a dude with an acoustic guitar and harmonica, regurgitating Willie Guthrie or Bob Dylan. I think of it as music of a time, the spirit of the people.”
Simone Felice plays London’s Bush Hall on Friday 27th April and is touring the UK until early May. His debut self-titled album is available to buy now
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