BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/New_York X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:153239@kingstonhappenings.org DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251230T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251230T190000 DTSTAMP:20260105T125251Z URL:https://kingstonhappenings.org/events/assemblys-1st-anniversary-party- the-felice-brothers-friends/ SUMMARY:Assembly's 1st Anniversary Party! The Felice Brothers & Friends DESCRIPTION:In the Valley of Abandoned Songs\, hope and joy sit side by sid e with fear and sorrow. As you stroll amongst the wildflowers and tombston es that dot the landscape\, you’ll pass innocence and shame\, faith and despair\, loneliness and love. You’ll feel the warm glow of the morning sun and the chilling darkness of impenetrable shadow. You’ll slip from t he present into the past\, from reality into dreams\, from life into death and maybe\, just maybe\, back into life once more.\n\n“There’s a tigh trope walk between light and dark in these songs\,” says Ian Felice\, “between the magical wonder of existence and the ever-present sense of i mpending doom that comes with it. This album is my way of reconciling thos e things.”\n\nValley of Abandoned Songs\, The Felice Brothers’ captiva ting new album and debut release for Conor Oberst’s new Million Stars la bel\, 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 he artbroken drifter watching the world through the slats of a boxcar\; the r egretful bellhop crying at the Ritz. Each is a loner struggling to find th eir way through a world that’s both devastatingly cruel and achingly bea utiful\, a restless searcher with a sharp eye for subtle detail and a penc hant for thoughtful reflection. Felice invites us to walk a mile in their shoes—sometimes through the plainspoken narrative voice of a Southern Go thic writer\, sometimes through the abstract expressionism of an avant-gar de painter or poet—and while the recordings here span a variety of sessi ons 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.\n\n“A lot of these songs are amalgam ations\,” Felice explains. “The settings can change from verse to vers e 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.” \n\nThat 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 ev erything 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 subw ay platforms and sidewalks in New York City to playing Radio City Music Ha ll with Bright Eyes and appearing everywhere from the Newport Folk Festiva l to Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble. Beginning with 2007’s Tonight At Th e Arizona\, the band helped pave the way for the modern folk revival\, whi le at the same time challenging its boundaries and conventions with bold s onic experimentation and unyielding integrity. The New York Times likened their music to “the rootsy mysticism of the Band\,” while Rolling Ston e praised the “scrappiness” of their “folk-rock noir\,” and The Gu ardian hailed their songs as “impeccably crafted\, with literary-minded lyrics that are both playful and profound.” Over the course of nine stud io albums\, the group shared bills with everyone from Old Crow Medicine Sh ow 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 t he road.\n\nIt was Oberst\, in fact\, who ensured that Valley of Abandoned Songs received a proper release.\n\n“A few years ago\, I started revisi ting old demos that had never seen the light of day and recordings that ha dn’t found a home on previous albums\,” Felice explains\, “and I sta rted 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 we ll as an album\, and so I shared it with Conor\, along with my idea to pos t it on online\, but he immediately texted back that he loved it so much h e wanted to start a new record label just to put it out.”\n\nThe tracks Felice had pulled together came primarily from sessions for the band’s 2 019 album\, Undress\, as well as their most recent release\, 2023’s Asyl um On The Hill\, both of which were captured live in an 1870s church with the band’s current lineup (Ian on guitar/lead vocals\, James Felice on k eyboards/vocals\, Jesske Hume on bass\, and Will Lawrence on drums). The t unes were misfits and outcasts in their own right—some had gone unfinish ed in the moment\, others simply didn’t match the overarching feel or th emes of those particular records—and the recordings were left intentiona lly raw and unvarnished.\n\n“I’ve always been drawn to artists who are willing to pull back the curtain\,” Felice reflects. “When there’s that private\, unguarded quality\, I often find it easier to relate to the work.”\nIntimacy has always been a hallmark of The Felice Brothers’ s ound (they’ve recorded albums in a chicken coop\, after all)\, but Valle y of Abandoned Songs feels more exposed than perhaps anything else in thei r catalog. That’s not to say the songs aren’t fleshed out here—smoky album opener “Crime Scene Queen” features gospel back-up singers and a lush\, full-band arrangement—but the performances are infused with the kind of loose and spontaneous energy that can only come from the act of m aking art for art’s sake\, from being fully and completely immersed in t he moment. The breezy “Flowers By The Roadside” finds an almost Buddhi st contentment in sitting still and watching the world roll on\, while the freewheeling “Younger As The Days Go By” makes peace with how little we ever really know about life\, and the enigmatic “New York By Moonligh t” finds simple pleasures in unexpected places: a startled flock of pige ons\, a prostitute in pastel tights\, a plume of exhaust hanging over a da mp city street.\n\nNot all residents of the Valley of Abandoned Songs are quite so enamored with their observations\, though. The narrators of the g alloping “Black Is My True Love’s Hair” and bittersweet “Stranger ’s Arms” reckon with the hollow feeling of searching for something tha t can’t be found\; the nursery rhyme nature of tunes like “Birdies” and “Racoon\, Rooster And Crow” belies their grim reminders of mortali ty and loss\; and the apocalyptic imagery of tracks like “Let Me Ride Aw ay With The Horsemen” and “It’s Midnight And The Doves Are In Tears ” reveals a profound disillusionment with the state of mankind. “From the jawbone of a donkey / To the atom bomb\,” Felice sings. “Science a nd progress / What have you done?”\n“There’s a persistence to the cr uelty that goes on in this world\,” he reflects. “I think the frustrat ion and the pain of it weighs on all of us at times.”\n\nThough his char acters feel it acutely\, Felice ultimately refuses to surrender to the wei ght of hopelessness on the record. The tender “Tomorrow Is Just A Dream Away” insists on believing in the possibility of something better\, even as our bloody history repeats itself over and over again\, and album clos er “To Be A Papa” pledges unconditional love in an unpredictable world . “Stay with me / For the road is long / And the winds are strong\,” F elice declares. “And I’ll stay with you.”\nIn the Valley of Abandone d Songs\, it turns out\, nothing gets abandoned after all.\n\nCHARLOTTE CO RNFIELD\nCharlotte Cornfield\, described by Rolling Stone as “Canada’s best-kept secret”\, is celebrated for her distinctive and influential s ongwriting voice. She has toured extensively in North America and Europe s upporting a huge range of artists including Broken Social Scene\, Bonny Li ght Horseman\, and Julien Baker. Her 2023 album Could Have Done Anything r eceived outstanding reviews in NPR\, Pitchfork and Exclaim! and garnered h igh praise from the likes of Iggy Pop\, Boygenius and Kurt Vile. ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://kingstonhappenings.org/wp-content/upload s/2025/12/587193369_122195879240562532_447891346182634446_n.jpg CATEGORIES:@Featured,@Newsletter,Music,Nightlife and entertainment LOCATION:Assembly\, 236 Wall St. 3rd Floor\, KINGSTON\, NY\, 12401\, United States GEO:41.931738;-74.018648 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=236 Wall St. 3rd Floor\, KI NGSTON\, NY\, 12401\, United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=Assembly:ge o:41.931738,-74.018648 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20251102T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR