In the final instalment of our exclusive Simone Felice video series, the singer and poet from New York's Catskill mountains takes us on a tour of three further locations that kept him sane, whilst, around him, life seemed like an extract from the book of Job. These are also the places that inspired his forthcoming album, released April 2. As ever Felice proves an amiable and charismatic guide, and his haunts are the sort of places to nourish the soul of anyone in need of contemplation. But Felice is not anyone and he has also written a piece of prose-cum-blank-verse to accompany it. And what that means is much less clear.
Felice writes: "I live in a country of echoes. There, in the furthest distance, a dead genius screams the star spangled banner out into the abolished afternoon: electric, tortured, perfect. Girls round the maypole. And a war cry, painted men who dance to drums of hide and bone in a fire's light before this world was cured. Beautiful. I've heard a poet's song of a night but eyed he not. Woman's voices, magic, hushed, love songs of child-birth and lamentation. Shots fired in anger, a horse falling in a dark road, silent night...
Didn't I tell myself one day I'd set out, court adventure, play the lover, make my fortuneI walk a landscape of shadows. Walk this ten mile circuit since my world began. Over and over, crimson and clover. See it here in digital. And didn't I tell myself one day I'd set out, court adventure, play the lover, make my fortune. Hold now, there I am, seventeen, dead and undying, caught on the wind like the rest: 'Unless you leave... unless you run... unless you leave your life will pass you by.'
Yet here I am. Mill-high. Crows feet. Still reaching. Lost in the twilight's last gleaming."
Firstly, we travel with Felice to the waterfall he and his brothers would walk to from their cabin retreat where they wrote music on an old steel-stringed acoustic guitar. In the freezing midwinter, the waterfall has partially turned to ice.
Watch Felice's Waterfall
Next, we are shown around an old abandoned timber-frame Catholic Church, where local rumour has it, Bob Dylan was secretly married in the late sixties. Although a religious sceptic, Felice says he found something “pretty holy” up there.
Watch Felice's Bob Dylan Church
Finally, Felice drives up to the frozen Cooper lake. Whilst recovering from an almost fatal condition, where one aorta started to turn to stone through calcium deposits, Felice would go there to put things in perspective. He still visits almost every day.
Watch Felice's "Frozen Lake"
- The lead single from Simone Felice, "You and I Belong" is released March 19
