The Felice Brothers 2027

You'll slip from the present into the past, from reality into dreams, from life into death and maybe, just maybe, back into life once more. "There's a tightrope walk between light and dark in these songs," says Ian Felice, "between the magical wonder of existence and the ever-present sense of impending doom that comes with it. This album is my way of reconciling those things.

" Valley of Abandoned Songs, The Felice Brothers' captivating new album and debut release for Conor Oberst's new Million Stars label, is more than just a personal reckoning, though; it's a deep and incisive meditation on what makes us human, on the search for meaning and connection as told through the eyes of a wide-ranging cast of misfits and outcasts. There's the nightclub singer with blood on her hands; the heartbroken drifter watching the world through the slats of a boxcar; the regretful bellhop crying at the Ritz. Each is a loner struggling to find their way through a world that's both devastatingly cruel and achingly beautiful, a restless searcher with a sharp eye for subtle detail and a penchant for thoughtful reflection.

Felice invites us to walk a mile in their shoes-sometimes through the plainspoken narrative voice of a Southern Gothic writer, sometimes through the abstract expressionism of an avant-garde painter or poet-and while the recordings here span a variety of sessions across a period of several years, the result is a remarkably cohesive collection that manages to feel utterly timeless and particularly attuned to the present moment all at once. "A lot of these songs are amalgamations," Felice explains. "The settings can change from verse to verse and scene to scene.

I don't necessarily know who these characters are or where they come from, but they all evoke something very real in me. " That balance of mystery and familiarity has been central to The Felice Brothers' identity ever since they first emerged from the Hudson Valley nearly two decades ago with a gloriously ramshackle sound that drew on everything from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Walt Whitman and Flannery O'Connor. In just a few short years, the group went from busking on subway platforms and sidewalks in New York City to playing Radio City Music Hall with Bright Eyes and appearing everywhere from the Newport Folk Festival to Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble.

Beginning with 2007's Tonight At The Arizona, the band helped pave the way for the modern folk revival, while at the same time challenging its boundaries and conventions with bold sonic experimentation and unyielding integrity. The New York Times likened their music to "the rootsy mysticism of the Band," while Rolling Stone praised the "scrappiness" of their "folk-rock noir," and The Guardian hailed their songs as "impeccably crafted, with literary-minded lyrics that are both playful and profound. " Over the course of nine studio albums, the group shared bills with everyone from Old Crow Medicine Show to Mumford & Sons, took their intoxicating live show to Coachella, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and countless other festivals across the US and Europe, and backed up Conor Oberst extensively in the studio and on the road.

It was Oberst, in fact, who ensured that Valley of Abandoned Songs received a proper release. "A few years ago, I started revisiting old demos that had never seen the light of day and recordings that hadn't found a home on previous albums," Felice explains, "and I started thinking of them as the Valley of Abandoned Songs. At a certain point, I realized that I had a particular group of tunes that worked really well as an a