Features Track By Track: Simone Felice - ‘New York Times’

Simone Felice only released his first solo album earlier this year, but he’s back already with a new EP, ‘New York Times’. And who better to talk us through it than the man himself?

New York Times
My grandfather taught me to read by going over stories in the local newspaper. I’ve maintained the habit and it seems that over the years the stories have gotten more and more demented. This is a song about bad news. About a country in decay. About a dream rotting away. About the warped, murky promises of fame and the myriad voices of the dead.



The Radio
Ever since I was a boy I dreamed of a day when my ship would come in. When I’d win the lotto and could move to Paris or LA and leave this pitiful hamlet with its sorrows and wants. Maybe I’ll invent something useful. Find a precious metal. Get drafted by the Yankees. Find a backpack full of cocaine. Write a hit song. But the thing that’s taken me all this time to know is that no matter where we run, no matter how far, we cannot escape ourselves. You can take the boy out of the country but you cant cake the country out of the boy.

War Movie
‘War Movie’ was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. I recorded it around the same time as ‘Charade’, maybe the same day. Later on my brother James played the most haunted, subtle accordion on it, which I loved and still do. And though this one moved me just as much as any of the songs that made the album, I kept it off, for one of those weird reasons that seem so important when you make the final cut, but often turn out to be meaningless as time goes by.

Why ‘War Movie’? Because love is a war. Love is a mad horse, and hard to catch, its mouth foams, it hobbles, it dances drunk from tree to tree in the dark and screams your name in the fray.

Great Big Circle
I’ve always been struck by the things people leave by the roadside to mark the place where a loved one died in a crash. Flowers both plastic and real. Crosses, candles, beads, any number of odd charms. Stuffed animals. Photographs in plastic bags. A wet bible. I wanted to understand what draws us to these places of pain and death, like carrion birds. Why we revisit the points where a life was cut short. As if the ones we lose are there waiting, watching us place our offering upon the ground from some vantage point in the tall weeds.

California
A song about habits, about needs, how we lean toward this thing or that to feel comforted, empowered, safe. Writing it I pictured this vast swath of land that has only been named America for a few hundred years now, stretching out to the sea, to a golden coast where, if we could just get there, if we could only make it there, by any means necessary, if we could but reach the shore, feel the surf at our feet, plant a flag, then, and only then would we be whole. Not so. When you think you’ve filled one hole a dozen more appear.

Simone Felice’s new EP ‘New York Times’ is out now via Reveal.