“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.” These are words of Daniel Burnham lived by. James Felice would have loved Daniel Burnham. On this second effort outside of The Felice Brothers, Homeworld Blue, instead of something small and intimate, he goes wide screen with arrangements incorporating strings, horns, harps, even a full orchestra. Almost unimaginable in scope, it is the result of a stint the Felice Brothers spent with Conor Oberst working on Salutations back in 2017.
Beginning in 2022, during the final days of Covid, Felice set out writing Homeworld Blue. Having spent most of his recorded history in converted chicken coops, garages and basements, he longed for something grander in scale. Working with producer and arranger Nate Wolcott, they started thinking big. Huge. Creating sounds reflecting cathedrals and oak trees 100 feet tall.
Starting in Omaha with a small rhythm section, they laid down the bare bones over a couple of weeks. Wolcott then took these recordings to Los Angeles, spending the next two years refining the sound, creating arrangements with a scope and grandeur to match their dreams. Homeworld Blue delivers on that notion delivering a tribute to the vision they both shared, creating an environment distilling the both the positive and negative. As Felice declares, “I look for warmth and hopefulness in a world that is overwhelmingly dark and brutal.”
From the opening notes of ‘A Lot to Lose’ it becomes clear the sound has taken on new, undreamed-of dimensions. From piano and banjo violins emerge, building a something new and structurally different from what has gone before, while his lyrics still revel in the nuanced moments, “I gotta lot to lose/ And when it’s gone/ It’s gone for good.” Those everyday details serve as the building blocks for moments of symphonic glory.
With horns to the fore, ‘Let Yourself Live’ turns everything on its head. The opening lines layout how bad it can get. “I pissed my pants at the Christmas dance/ We can take it/ Go ahead and let yourself live.” After an opening like that how bad can things get? Pretty bad actually as the song strips back to just piano for the penultimate line, “My best friend died from suicide/ That is awful, but you gotta let yourself live.” Where one could hear this with accompaniment from The Preservation Hall Brass Band, in the hands of Wolcott the horns shoot for something more decidedly widescreen and deliver with a vengeance.
No stone is left unturned in the quest to make the music bigger and more symphonic. ‘Midflight’ focuses on an encounter with the almighty, or is it just a reverie with one’s own memories? In either case, amongst the muted strings, Felice conjures up a meeting with a (possibly Biblical) snake. As he sings, he experiences both the incredible and the almost too credible, “We met in our secret life/ Hungover as the home world o’re the lunar sky.” In the final moments though, he gets his comeuppance, “I’m so ashamed of this/ But I reached out to him/ As he closed the gates.”
More like a film score, ‘Homeward Blue’ merges flutes, horns and strings to create a massive experience. Cue Felice, “First, there was light.” Timpani roar, trumpets blare creating a moment to rival creation itself. By song’s end man has become aware of just how small he really is. “All of us just huddled up on a speck of dust in an empty room/ Speck of dust is being generous.” We are but small pieces of a much larger picture.
Finally, there is ‘Past the Agway’. A ramble across the familiar back roads of Felice’s own Hudson Valley. Highlighting landmarks on a drive through the countryside as the piano plays, one realizes that his familiarity with these surroundings makes him feel that once again he is at home.
Homeworld Blue is a journey through landscapes created by James Felice and brought to full fruition with the help of Nate Wolcott. They have created a most unique travelogue into the highways and byways of the soul.