• Nicole Atkins & Simone Felice
• 9:00pm

ABOUT NICOLE ATKINS

With her throaty vibrato and nostalgic, orchestrated pop songs, singer/songwriter Nicole Atkins brings to mind a blend of Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn and Jenny Lewis. Atkins was raised in Neptune, NJ -- a town whose influence would later play a large part in her debut album -- and relocated to North Carolina during her late teens to study illustration at UNC Charlotte. After befriending members of the Avett Brothers and logging several years with the alt country band Los Parasols, she briefly returned to the tri-state area, where a series of open mic performances in Manhattan's East Village helped her hone a sound that was more indebted to pop music than her work with Los Parasols.

Atkins spent the following years traveling between North Carolina and the Northeast, eventually settling in New Jersey at her parents' house. Performances in New York City helped her attract attention from several local musicians, and Atkins soon pieced together a backing band comprising guitarist Dave Hollinghurst, bassist John Flaughter, drummer Dan Mintzer, and keyboardist Daniel Chen. Operating under the name Nicole Atkins & the Sea, the band secured a residency at Piano's -- a popular nightspot in the Lower East Side -- and struck a deal with Columbia Records on the strength of Atkins' demo recordings and impressive performances. Atkins released the Bleeding Diamonds EP in 2006, and the group decamped to Sweden later that year to work on a full-length album. Featuring the songwriter's self-professed "pop-noir" sound, Neptune City arrived in late 2007, followed by an EP of covers titled Nicole Atkins Digs Other People’ Songsin 2008.

In 2009 the lineup of the Sea changed completely, with Atkins stating that the band name had been changed and is "a bit (different)" and now bills as Nicole Atkins and The Black Sea.The band now features Christopher Donofrio on drums, Brad York on guitars, and Anthony Chick on bass. Adkins also announced in late 2009 the release of a new album scheduled for Spring 2010. Titled Mondo Amore it will be the first independent release after Atkins severed her ties to Columbia Records.

ABOUT SIMONE FELICE

Simone Felice is a celebrated songwriter, author, and poet who was born in 1976 in Palenville, New York, and grew up along the creek that rushes down from the Kaaterskill Falls. Considered one of America’s natural wonders in the nation’s youth, this hidden Catskill Mountain waterfall attracted early landscape painters, transcendental philosophers, and writers, Thomas Cole, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and Mark Twain among them.

At the age of 12 the young Simone suffered a brain aneurysm and was pronounced clinically dead following brain surgery in a local hospital. After recovering he spent several months in intensive care relearning basic motor skills, including reading and writing.

When he was 15 he started a punk band with friends, making weird noise-rock in his grandpa’s barn. Their emphasis was on head-banging and freaky storytelling, being moved by heros like Black Sabbath, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and Iron Maiden. By the age of 18, he had quit school and was fronting the band (by this time calling themselves: Eight Body Trunk, in homage to the 1950’s Lincoln Continental an aging mafioso drove up and down the streets of their nowhere town) playing barns, bars, and low down clubs, including New York City’s fabled CBGB’s.

Eventually the young rockers went their separate ways and Felice began writing poetry and vignettes, leading to the publication of his first collection of poems, The Picture Show, when he was 20 years old. He began performing these bizarre monologues regularly at the historic Nuyorican Poets Café in New York, garnering the young poet invitations to come read in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, London and Berlin.

In 2004 and then 2005, underground New York publishers printed Simone’s first short works of fiction, Goodbye Amelia, a coming of age story about a small-town girl with secrets to keep and a hunger to see the world, and Hail Mary Full of Holes, about a prostitute struggling to survive during the dawn of the Reagan era.

In the Fall of 2001, just after the attacks on New York City, Simone began writing songs with his brother Ian. Together they retreated to the woods they grew up in, where jobless with a cheap guitar they wrote and made recordings (two recently unearthed archive collections know as The Big Empty and Mexico) with their friend Doc Brown. In this manner the two brothers clocked four years in complete obscurity, sewing the seeds of what would become (with the edition of younger brother James in the Winter of 2006) The Felice Brothers, whose subsequent albums Tonight at the Arizona, The Felice Brothers, and Yonder is the Clock, have gone on to achieve international renown, earning these upstate New York natives an inarguable place in the Great American Songbook. Over the group’s history Simone has remained one of it’s chief lyricists, co-writing and writing some their most beloved songs, including "Frankie’s Gun", "Run Chicken Run", "Ruby Mae", "Whiskey in My Whiskey", "Love Me Tenderly", "Hey Hey Revolver", "Mercy, Your Belly In My Arms", "The Devil Is Real", "Radio Song" and "Don’t Wake The Scarecrow" to name just a few.

At the surprise request of iconic record producer Rick Rubin, Simone flew to California in the late summer of 2008 to play drums on the Columbia release I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers. Lending his signature dirty Catskill Mountain soul to the Avett’s riveting songwriting and Rubin’s flawless production, Felice appears on some of the albums stand-out numbers, including the title-track and popular single I and Love and You.

In the winter of 2008/2009 personal tragedy struck Simone and his long-time love with the loss of their first child. He retreated to a cabin in his beloved Catskill’s with his old friend Bobbie Bird and began writing and recording the songs that would become The Duke & The King’s debut album. Taking their name from the itinerant Shakespeare theatre grifters in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the duo released the gripping Nothing Gold Can Stay in the Summer of 2009 to immediate international critical acclaim, being hailed as one of the most haunting and honest albums of the year.

Felice has just completed his first novel, Black Jesus, the story of a young American war veteran returned to his hometown, the fictional Galilee, New York, after being blinded in Iraq by a homemade bomb, and the unexpected love he finds with a mysterious dancer who arrives in the town, fleeing darkness and violence of a different kind.

Simone lives less than a mile from the creek-house he was born in, and continues to travel his own country and abroad, performing his songs and stories to rapt crowds.