THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Felice Brothers 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 years, the group went from busking in the subway 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 band’s 2024 record, Valley Of Abandoned Songs, marks The Felice Brothers’ debut for Conor Oberst’s new Million Stars label and showcases the group at their most intimate and unvarnished. Balancing hope and despair in equal measure, the album explores the search for meaning and connection through the eyes of a wide-ranging cast of misfits and outcasts, and though the recordings here span several years of almost-lost tunes, the result is a thoroughly cohesive collection that manages to feel both utterly timeless and particularly attuned to the present all at once.
“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, and I started thinking of them as the Valley Of Abandoned Songs,” explains Ian Felice. “At a certain point, I realized that I had a particular group of tunes that worked really well as an album, and so I shared it with Conor, along with my idea to post it online, but he immediately texted back that he loved it so much he wanted to start a new record label just to put it out.”
Oberst adds: “I first encountered The Felice Brothers in 2007 after being given some of their music by a friend. I liked it a lot, but there was something I couldn’t put my finger on — singular and mysterious. An iconoclastic version of what some lazy people call ‘Americana.’ I subsequently met them and played shows together. They became some of my best friends, family, really. I put out two of their records on the label I co-owned at the time, called Team Love. Then we started to perform together with them as my backing band and made a record of mine called Salutations.
“Needless to say, I love this band, and when asked that horrible question, ‘Who is your favorite band?’ I always answer The Felice Brothers. So when Ian sent me this new collection of songs and told me they just planned to put it up on the internet, I kind of flipped out, because they were so goddamn good. And then I did something I swore I would never do again: I started a new record label. This is my third. It is called Million Stars, and I am so proud to say the new Felice Brothers album is our first release. I can’t quit them. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.”
