Q&A: Felly on moving toward indie rock from hip hop ahead of Pittsburgh show

Genre-blurring musical artist Felly turned 30 earlier this month, celebrating at Dan Tana’s, a famous Italian restaurant in Los Angeles with close friends who’d been along for his journey from rapper/producer to the indie rock he’s partial to now.

“Honestly, 30 is a trip for me. I’ve always played so much of my persona on youngness. I used to call myself, even when I was like 25, 26, I was ‘youngest kid alive.’ So a lot of fans and stuff refer to me as that. I did a bunch of albums called ‘Young Fel,’ and it’s weird to get where you can’t really lean on that too much anymore,” he said with a laugh on the day after his birthday. “You’re not that young. I feel like I’m always somewhere in between an 18-year-old and a grandpa. So here we are.”

Felly got his start making mixtapes and an EP while attending the University of Southern California, working his way to collaborations with Jack Harlow and Carlos Santana. He released his latest album, “Ambroxyde,” this summer, with recording taking place all around the world.

His For the Crow tour launches Tuesday, with a Pittsburgh stop on Sept. 30 at Thunderbird Music Hall in Lawrenceville. It’ll be his first show in the city, with him giving props to Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa.

“I view it as a very cool, maybe overlooked pocket of America that I kind of am ashamed that I haven’t been to yet,” he said. “So I’m definitely excited to come by.”

In a Zoom call last week from Los Angeles, Felly spoke with TribLive about playing new songs live, moving from rap, Radiohead and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

You’re going to be starting your “For the Crows” tour on Sept. 23. Are you looking forward to hitting the road with that?

Absolutely. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be a long one. They definitely booked something that was a little bit longer than I expected or wanted, but you gotta do it. I think it’s important as an artist in today’s world to actually be out there doing it, or else you’re just kind of on Instagram and you might as well be AI at that point because you’re just on a screen. So it’s going to be nice to go out and touch people and feel real things.

Have you got to play many of the new songs live yet?

Almost none of them. We did one festival and we tried some stuff out and it was kind of rough, and we just are figuring out how to play them. They’re harder songs to play live. The band aspect is something that I’ve always been slowly bringing into my set because I obviously started a little bit more with hip hop stuff and rapper/DJ stuff. I always knew the goal was to eventually make it feel like a full-band experience the whole time. So just tightening up some screws on that. But my players are amazing, so I don’t have too much to worry about.

What are the new songs that you’re going to be playing?

We’ll definitely be playing “Song for the Crows” because it’s called the For the Crows tour. “Spinning Around” is a song that we played that’s the first song on the new album. That’s a song that we played a bunch of times on tour before we even recorded it, sort of like how Pink Floyd did back in the day to feel out the songs live. You get an idea of the arrangement and how it should go and try to match that on the actual recording. So we’ll be playing those two for sure. And then going to slide into some other favorites like “High on You” and “Emmy” and stuff like that.

Is “Let Me Down Easy” going to be one of them?

We have to figure out how to play that one because it’s definitely giving a live feel to it. You like that one?

That was one of the ones that stood out to me. It seems like if you’re going to have a band, that might work.

I think you’re absolutely right. That’s definitely got the Fontaines D.C. inspiration. A lot of the bands that I’ve been seeing lately, that’s their world. So I’m stepping into that and feeling out where I sit in all of it.

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If you look at your current musical mindset, how would you describe where it is right now?

Do you like Radiohead? You know how they did “Kid A” after “OK Computer,” and “Kid A” kind of did away with guitars completely. They were like, we don’t want to be a guitar indie rock band. And then they did “Kid A,” which is extremely experimental, and then it had all synths and stuff. And then later on, like six, seven years down the road, they kind of weaved everything together with their album “In Rainbows.”

I feel like that’s where I’m at. I think this most recent album was band-centric indie. I made a conscious choice: I’m not going to rap at all, and I’m going to try to make something that feels like a studio album. I think right now I’m realizing that’s one side of me, but so is the stuff where I’m producing myself and doing hip hop music and messing with sounds and just getting a little bit more using the studio as an instrument and creating like that. I’m trying to weave in both worlds where it’s not me shutting the door on hip hop music, and it’s not me shutting the door on indie music, but it’s kind of synthesizing everything in a more natural way.

I think I had to touch all those bases to see what I like from there. But even with the most recent record, I love the musicality aspect of it. But there’s something that I miss in hip hop music and rap music, specifically, there’s a certain directness, where it feels like you’re just cutting through and it almost doesn’t matter what the music is, and you’re not distracting anything. It’s message-driven, and it’s direct. So I want to weave in musicality and directness and synthesize everything right now. That’s kind of been the goal for the next stuff I’m working on.

You mentioned about moving a little bit away from rap. Did you get any pushback from your audience about that?

No, I think I’ve done it slowly enough where the people who are here still — because I did an album in 2020, “Mariposa,” which had guitars and stuff like that and I’ve been touring a little bit more with the band — I’ve been slowly shoeing it in. There’s obviously still always going to be straight hip hop fans who just want, ‘Go back to rap, just rap.’ I don’t blame them. I think that’s how a lot of people found me. Just to me, it’s boring to stay in one place for too long, especially in rap music. I feel like it has a life expectancy to it that’s lower – I don’t see myself 50 years old rapping. I see myself maybe including some hip hop elements. Grateful Dead was able to be touring until they’re old and have beards because they could essentially just jam at some point when they’re older. But yeah, I did get some pushback for sure.

The album was recorded in Iceland, Greece, Texas and California. How did all those different locations help to shape the record?

It was really cool, because we recorded in a collaging manner where we would get recordings in studios, different takes, different vibes, different energies, depending on where we were, the mood. Then as we kind of baby these records along and had them all still in one project, we’d have maybe one project with, here’s the drums and the guitars from Iceland. And then we loved the vocal in Greece. And then, maybe we did some stuff back home in L.A., and kind of collaged it. I think it was all just an additive, chipping away, adding, reducing, adding, reducing to see what actually worked.

I think those places more so for, it was sort of like R&D, researching and curating the vibe and understanding what I’m going for and who I am. I don’t think it’s necessary to go to a million places to make a record. You can make a record in your bedroom, but I think opening up your mind to more influences is always cool. And then coming back into a quiet place and being like, OK, well, who am I really? So it’s not just a collage of everything.

The song, “Song for the Crows,” was one of the standout songs to me. Is there a story behind that song?

Yeah, that song is sort of a premonition. It’s a dive into my childhood. My dad got diagnosed for brain cancer when I was about six or seven years old. He passed away around then, a year or two after. Before he was diagnosed — I might’ve been younger, five or something — my mom said she looked out on the lawn and there was a bunch of crows. She’s kind of a superstitious/spiritual type of woman, and she got the call the next day and kind of just had this bad omen about that being a sign.

To a young kid’s mind and kid’s brain, to think the crows know something that we don’t is definitely a lot to take on, and that image has always stuck in my head. So “Song for the Crows” is sort of a letter to death and a message to death that’s on your doorstep, and it weaves in between what my dad must have been feeling and what was going on in the house and the mood of that whole time. I tried to give it a little bit of an energy and a spook to it because it was a pretty spooky time in Connecticut, winter time coming around, going in and out of hospitals, and just being in this state of unknown and a surrender to the unfortunate fate that might’ve just been in the cards. That might’ve been just how things had to play out and we’re just at the mercy of the stars sometimes.

With the album title, “Ambroxyde,” how did you come up with that? That’s some interesting stuff, where it comes from.

Yeah, it’s whale, it’s a scent. When we were in Iceland, we went to this perfumery, which was started by the guy from Sigur Rós, which is a big band in Iceland, and he started this perfumery. We went in there and this woman read us a poem. She had us close our eyes and smell a scent, and the scent was inspired by this woman’s grandfather, who was coming back from the shipping docks. So it had rusty screws, leather, salt, seawater, tobacco pipe, all these smells in it. She’s just reading this poem to us about life and smells, and we’re starting to activate and trigger things. It was a really emotional experience.

I was very interested in scents and started to buy some candles from them and keep things burning and keep scents and aromas in the mood. I usually use my ears, and my ears are my main sense, but I realize there’s so much art and feeling that could come from other senses, like smell or visually, like spaces, architecture, rooms, things that could serve you just as much as music can. So I wanted to weave in something and Ambroxyde was essentially a candle that I was burning during this time and feeling a lot of things, falling in love. It has all these notes that just touched me in certain ways, reminded me of certain things that just felt powerful. And it’s just a cool title. It’s weird.