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Felicity is intimately familiar with fire: both the kind that drives her to make music — and the kind she’s had to walk through in pursuit of that dream. After years of globe-trotting, false promises, and working every odd bar job, though, and she’s finally ablaze. Her debut EP, You Take Me To Dinner But You'll Never Feed My Soul, is coming out via East Music Row Records on July 19, and it’s a goddamn barnburner.
Born in Perth, Australia, Felicity spent her childhood bouncing between such far-flung locales as Indonesia, South Africa, and… Colorado. Raised on a steady diet of Rihanna, Amy Winehouse, Queen, and Alanis Morrisette, she started playing violin and singing as a child. Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill, in particular, appealed to the young musician. “She did not try to write a single song on that record,” Felicity recalls. “She wrote every single song on that record because she had to.” (That’s a need that she understands all too well these days.) The budding musician wrote her first song at age 15, recording the track with studio time her mother won at a local auction, which launched her straight into the fraught web of the music world. Still, at the time, she only knew that writing songs felt right. “I just felt like my soul was fed and satiated for the first time,” she says.
After linking up with a New York producer at 17, Felicity moved to the East Coast on her lonesome, where she lived in the producer’s studio basement for a few years. In 2018, she released her first singles, “Pilot With a Fear of Heights,” “Poison” and “Sugar.” “I was still honing exactly what I wanted to sound like,” she says. “Only now has the music become a true mouthpiece for me and what I want to sound like.”
After deciding to no longer work with that producer, Felicity found her way to Nashville in 2021 in search of new material — and inspiration. She’s not a country musician per se, but she could appreciate how Music City is just that: a place where the very air is scented with song. There, she linked up with producer Austin Luther and songwriters Dylan Taylor, Johnny Gates, Warren Lively and Ellis Melillo. At the time, though, she was still feeling rundown — sick of empty words and false leads. “I loved the music, and I will continue to love the music, but I don't think it's gonna love me back,” she remembers thinking. “When am I going to take the hint?”
All that changed in 2023, when Gates begged Felicity to sign to his new label, East Music Row Records, her entire catalogue of unreleased songs in tow. “I was like, ‘Hell yeah, like, let's go. I can walk through a little more fire. Who gives a fuck at this point?’” she says. Felicity took all those life experiences — both positive and not-so-positive — and funneled them into You Take Me To Dinner But You'll Never Feed My Soul, a rumination on both her love of music and romantic foibles. “I’ve sat at plenty of tables in my career with industry people who promised me all sorts of things and never delivered,” she says of the title. “And I’ve dated plenty of guys where it’s almost there but not quite.”
The EP kicks off with the tense, spare “I Prefer You in My Head,” written with Warren Lively and Ellis Melillo. “The song basically wrote us,” Felicity says. Melillo was going through a breakup and showed up to the session sad — and bit late. After a brief period of lying on the floor with her face buried in the carpet, though, Melillo and the rest exorcised that old lover by immortalizing his inadequacies in song. “We made the choice to keep the production stripped down to a single note on guitar and a few harmonies in the back,” Felicity says. “It allowed the song to really breathe and take in every painful lyric front on.”
She gets more personal on “There’s Been a Lot Going On,” titled after a favorite phrase of her mom’s. Felicity wrote the bitter, mournful track about burning out after pulling yet another unending shift at “this hellacious sports bar where all dreams go to die.” “I felt guilty for neglecting certain aspects of my life and those around me that cared for me and at the time it just felt like there was too damn much going on,” she says. “The song wrote itself.” The sexy, growling “Lovebomb” slithers in next, one of the first songs Felicity wrote in Nashville after she and Taylor bonded over fuckbois who promise too much at the beginning. “Austin really breathed new life and energy into the song once we took it from the slow-burn acoustic vibe it had initially to the electric, four-on-the-floor, driving track that it became,” Felicity says.
“Throw My Heart Away” is a throwback to Felicity’s New York City days, a grimy, punky track that she wrote with Taylor before she could even settle into the studio with Luther; in fact, her backpack was still in hand when they got to work. “It's a grungy, dirty love story that ends like shit,” she says, laughing. And that “screw it” energy only continues — rounding out the EP with an almost country-esque (hello, Nashville!) revenge song, “So Called Rich Man.”
“I wanted something that truly encapsulated my previous experiences with people in the industry that promised me things they could never deliver and made me feel small and inadequate in the process,” she says of the track. “‘So Called Rich Man’ is absolutely a mouthpiece for that feeling.” Oh yes, Felicity has a lot more fuel for that fire — and she’s ready to burn.