EXPLAINING his second solo album title, Catskill Mountains novelist, poetic visionary and songwriter Simone Felice says: “Isn’t it wild how, when it comes to matters of the heart, we can start out so fanatical, so certain, only to end up as strangers in the end? Remote even to ourselves over time, strangers in the mirror.”

Ironically, Strangers feels very familiar, the summation of his work with The Felice Brothers and The Duke & The King and now under his own sails. He recorded it with co-producer and friend David Baron, his core band, brother James Felice on accordion and harmonies and guests Wesley Schultz & Jeremiah Fraites of The Lumineers. Oh, and a “drunken horn section” on the opening Molly-O, in which he invokes us to “go off the rails a bit”.

By contrast, his ever beautiful music is a conventional, classicist brew of blues, gospel and country that works a treat on Running Through My Head and Bastille Day, but it is his fiery and fearless lyrics in American tales full of God, the devil, sins and redemptive love, that pump the troubled heart.