Felice Brothers Tribute Album to Feature Lumineers, Bright Eyes

The Felice Brothers are finally getting their due. On Oct. 16th, Felice County Fair: A Celebration of the Felice Brothers, a star-studded album paying tribute to the songbook of the upstate New York collective, will be released on Sony Records. 

While the full list of collaborators yet to be revealed, Felice County Fair will include more than two dozen songs, with contributions from roots luminaries like Lumineers, Bright Eyes, Old Crow Medicine Show (“Penn Station”), Nathaniel Rateliff, Dawes (“Jazz on the Autobahn”) Brandon Flowers, Bebe Stockwell, and Deer Tick. 

The Felice Brothers were founded by three brothers (James, Ian, and Simone) in the mid-Aughts, and over the subsequent 20 years have become one of the more widely influential (if not all that commercially successful) roots groups of their generation. There have been a number of lineup changes along the way: Simone Felice long ago left the group, and for the past eight years the band has been anchored by bassist Jesske Hume and drummer Will Lawrence. Still, James and Ian Felice have been writing songs that have shaped both their peers and younger musicians. Felice County Fair is a testament of that enduring influence.

“They’ve been this underground secret,” the Lumineers’ Wesley Schultz tells Rolling Stone. “And we don’t want them to be the best kept secret in music anymore.”

Bright Eyes and the Lumineers, two groups that have long ranked among the Felice Brothers’ biggest champions, provide the first two offerings from the album: The Lumineers’ tackle the 2017 song “The Kid,” which Schultz first heard after attending the Felice Brothers’ annual New Year’s Eve shows in Kingston, New York, while Bright Eyes interpret “Wonderful Life.”

“There’s a lot said with very little,” Schultz says of “The Kid.” “It’s like Steinbeck. He’s saying so much with so few words. You think about a song like a weapon and these blunt sledgehammers move people, but they don’t get the same reaction as a very small dagger that can get past your ribs and into your heart. You have to choose the weapon. Sometimes these weapons move the masses. But when it’s little and it gets you so deep in there, the people who have heard it don’t forget it.… [The song] changed my perception about drug addiction and empathy for people through songwriting. You’re crying for and rooting for the character in the song.”

Conor Oberst, meanwhile, has collaborated with the Felice Brothers, releasing their 2024 album Valley of Abandoned Songs on his own label and even recruiting them as his own backing band. Here, Bright Eyes cover “Wonderful Life,” a standout ballad from the band’s classic 2008 self-titled record.

“Whatever little checkmarks in my heart need to be checked to make the perfect music, they check all those things,” Oberst said in a statement. “I want people to have the same experience I’ve had with how they’ve transformed my life with their art.”