The O-town Scene - Oneonta, NY
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/27337
Music People The Felice Brothers The Catskills-rooted Felice Brothers will officially open the Oneonta Theatre’s second season with a performance March 25. (A SUNY Oneonta WONY 90.9 event will be March 18.) The group’s sound is often labeled “Americana” or “neo-folk,” but bassist Christmas Clapton says they do not fit into any single genre. This is especially true with the band’s upcoming album, “Celebration, Florida,” which utilizes electronica. Sam Spokony spoke with Clapton about the band’s experiences recording in chicken coops and high school gyms, as well as storytelling and hipsters. O-TOWN SCENE: As a group with such a heavily folk-influenced sound, did you ever, when you started per- forming, feel like you were consciously flying in the face of 21st-century pop tastes? CHRISTMAS CLAPTON: I don’t think we thought about it too much, really. We just all started by playing acoustic guitars, which is a pretty common sound anyway, and we just took it from there. We didn’t know how to do anything when we first started (in 2006). No one really knew how to play an instrument. OS: In that case, was folk music some- thing you guys grew up listening to? Not really. I mean, we basically grew up on music we heard in the ’90s. We weren’t listening to the folk catalogue until much later. OS: So your sound was spontaneous then … something that just came out of the instruments when you learned to play them. CC: Yeah, totally. And the idea of storytell- ing, which is something you do find on those old records, I guess. That’s just what came out of us. OS: Your new album (“Celebration, 10 O-Town Scene March 17, 2011 Florida,” which will be released May 10 on Fat Possum Records) features a bunch of new electronic elements, as well as a lot of layering of parts, all of which take your sound in a really excit- ing new direction. Were you purposely planning to add more intricacies to the album, or were they just new spontane- ous developments? CC: We definitely went in with the concept of adding more stuff to it and layering it, but probably half of it was the result of haphaz- ardly picking up new instruments. So, yeah, it had that spontaneous feeling, because we were really just exploring those instruments while learning how to play them. OS: So you did all of the instrumen- tals? No hired hands? CC: Yeah, it was all us. OS: As a band that’s so focused on storytelling, did the narratives of your new tunes have anything to do with the instruments you chose to learn, or was it more about just using what was available? CC: The songs on this album are re- ally open-ended, and we just wanted to try something out that was new. You know, our other few albums had a certain vibe, and we Pieter M. Van Hattem/Uncut/IPC+ The Felice Brothers are, from left, Christmas Clapton, Greg Farley, James Felice, Dave Turbeville and Ian Felice. wanted to explore beyond that, and make another kind of weird statement. OS: So do you feel like you’re always, to some degree, making a statement when you record an album? CC: A statement … I don’t know, it’s not so much a statement, not so cut and dry. I feel like we believe we can just kind of create an atmosphere with it. There’s no particular sentence we want to lay down. You know, it’s like how anything is, really. OS: Let’s talk about the recording pro- cess itself, as you’re on a new label for this one, Fat Possum. I know that you’d chosen interesting places to record previous albums (such as in a chicken coop), and this time was no different, as you took the process to the gymna- sium and theater of an old high school in Beacon, NY. Are these “weird” makeshift studio spots just what you’ve become used to now? CC: Yeah, it’s definitely never a standard setting … and we’re definitely more used to being in a barn or a gym than a real studio. We’ve had the same producer (Jeremy Back- ofen) on all of our albums, and he’s a pretty deep guy _ kind of like a Swiss Army knife. We’ve just become more accustomed to those than being in some $1,000-a-day studios. OS: Do you think that your choices of “studios” are a product of the music you make, or do the settings have an effect on the music as you make it? CC: It definitely does impact the music we end up putting out. There are usually some limitations, but the makeshift settings work so well for us because there aren’t as many time restrictions … we can stay there through all hours of the night. There’s a big difference between using some random place for two months and renting out a real studio for two months, and it would just cost a whole lot more money. Plus, at 5 in the morning, you can just, kind of explore more than you would be able to if you were in a studio and you had to rush to get out in time before it closed for the night. OS: So it seems like it just becomes a part of your mindset as you’re record- ing. CC: It’s true. We had a deep relationship with the space, because instead of walking in and seeing amps and equipment set up everywhere, we brought in everything we need, and we just built our own studio out of it. Jeremy had this vision of where everything would go, and we put it together ourselves. It creates that real relationship. Continued on Page 11