The Felice Brothers

In the Valley of Abandoned Songs, hope and joy sit side by side with fear and sorrow. As you stroll amongst the wildflowers and tombstones 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 the present into the past, from reality into dreams, from life into death and maybe, just maybe, back into life once more.

"There's a tightrope walk between light and dark in these songs," says Ian Felice, "between the magical wonder of existence and the ever-present sense of impending doom that comes with it.

" Valley of Abandoned Songs, The Felice Brothers'captivating new album and debut release for Conor Oberst's new Million Stars label, 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 heartbroken drifter watching the world through the slats of a boxcar; the regretful bellhop crying at the Ritz.

Each is a loner struggling to find their way through a world that's both devastatingly cruel and achingly beautiful, a restless searcher with a sharp eye for subtle detail and a penchant for thoughtful reflection.

Felice invites us to walk a mile in their shoes-sometimes through the plainspoken narrative voice of a Southern Gothic writer, sometimes through the abstract expressionism of an avant-garde painter or poet-and while the recordings here span a variety of sessions 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.

"A lot of these songs are amalgamations," Felice explains.