There’s the natural world, and then there’s the world of James Felice, one sweeping and surreal and limitless. His prodigious new album, Homeworld Blue, is more than four years in the making, the product of the tail-end of the pandemic when many were still holed up in the confines of their homes and limited to one especially valuable resource: their imaginations. Recorded in Omaha under the keen eye of Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott, it is a work of staggering magnitude inspired by arrangements Felice dreamed up while writing these songs in the intimate setting of his attic. Where his 2025 solo debut, The Little Ones, was incandescent in its quiet subtlety, his sophomore record defies gravity, with big orchestral soundscapes and a feverish lyricism that demands more volume.
Amid flourishes of strings, timpanis, winds, and horns, plus his ever-humble but so enchanting piano-playing, Felice has planted a treasure trove of rich, lived-in characters with vivid inner worlds. He seems to take nuggets from his own experiences and build them out extensively until they take on a whole new life. These songs are deeply human, but the way they ruminate on death and rebirth is transcendent. “For it is what it is / And it always shall be / The easiest answers provide no kind of relief,” he sings like a preacher on “Let Yourself Live.” “We get what we get / And we use what can be used / You gotta let yourself live my friend what else can you do?”
