Simone Felice, a singer-songwriter and record producer hailing from the Catskills, has announced a UK and Ireland tour in support of his 2018 album The Projector.

Album opener and title track ‘The Projector’ is the album’s first single, a haunted track featuring Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan and folktronica from Four Tet, whom Felice counts as a close friend and neighbor. The track is reminiscent of tech-induced loneliness, with a choir singing: ‘All the while you felt so alone/but all the while there were bugs in the phone and you were not alone.’

Felice formed a band with his brothers in 2005 and soon began traversing the world. Hitting number one in the US and UK with one production collaborator (The Lumineers’s Cleopatra, 2016) and scoring a Mercury Music Prize nomination (Bat For Lashes’s The Bride, 2016) with another, Felice is heading into 2019 having recently produced Conor Oberst & Phoebe Bridgers, Jade Bird, Foy Vance and more.

“I’ve been down the track,” says Felice of his journey to success. “So often artists are looking to what they’re doing next, or are stuck in where they are today. Sometimes we forget to honour our history. I became a stand-up riddler, reciting my poems from napkins or from memory, it’s how I cut my teeth. For me this was the beginning of understating the diabolical alchemy of the English language, the rhymes, the pictures you can paint, both terrible and fair, or as Patti Smith calls it, ‘... a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.’”

On this upcoming tour, The Projector will be played in a run of intimate environments perfect for Felice’s highly individualistic tunes.

“Since my surgery you can hear my heart ticking,” says Felice. “If you’re in the room with me I’m the crocodile who swallowed the pocket watch. For a few years I’d try to dampen the sound when we made recording in the studio. But I’ve given up on that. If you listen closely, you’ll hear it when things go quiet. You might mistake it for a metronome that’s off-time. But it’s not. It’s just my achy breaky heart.”

April / May UK and Ireland tour dates:

25 April – Birmingham, UK at Hare & Hounds

26 April – Newcastle, UK at The Cluny 2

27 April – Glasgow, UK at The Blue Arrow

30 April – Manchester, UK at Leaf

01 May - Shrewsbury, UK at Henry Tudor House

02 May - London, UK at OMEARA

03 May - Bristol, UK at The Louisiana

08 May - Dublin, Ireland at The Sugar Club

09 May - Cork, Ireland at Coughlans

10 May – Bangor, Ireland at Studio 1A

www.simonefelice.com