Photo Credit: Bradley Cox

With the recent release of ‘Let It Move You’ The Feelings Parade have also delivered the visual for the Paul Simon classic ‘St. Judy’s Comet.’ When asked what led them to choose this song, the group advised,

“We used to sing this Paul Simon song to one another on tour when we were too tired to take care of ourselves anymore and just needed to go to bed. We already had way too many songs to fit on one record, and we rarely play covers, so we were surprised when it kept feeling right to get this one on there. We left some room for eO, who mixed the record, to put some of the sparkles and magic in, and we really love how it turned out. If you listen carefully, you can hear Scott’s cricket impression and Morgan giggle in the final verse. The chorus had been sounding really wrong until we got our friend Christopher Worth to come in and sing the low harmony. We were cat-sitting for Marty O’Reilly, who left his beautiful handmade C.F. Holcomb semi-hollow guitar behind, which is the one that Scott ended up playing on this track.”

Tap in and get taken by The Tides as this project delivers a tranquil mood shifting musically cosmic infusion of love, happiness, deep thoughts, and life.

Who is The Feelings Parade?

The Feelings Parade. Photo By: Bradley Cox

“What we did find is something that we don’t know how old or new it is – about .. about the size of a marble – you’ve got –  there’s something in your – in your brain.”

In February of 2020, songwriters Morgan Bolender and Scott Ferreter entered a studio to record the heart of their first proper studio album as The Feelings Parade.

The global Covid-19 pandemic curtailed some of that progress, though the duo kept recording at home and where it was distant and safe. With the van loaded up and their home studio ready to be moved for the eighth time — roughly about a week before the album was finished — Morgan had an unexpected 8-minute seizure, which led to brain surgery. From there, Morgan (who couldn’t have visitors in the hospital) sent recorded updates by the doctor to Scott, who was parked outside in the van.  Those recordings soon became part of the larger framework of the duo’s much-delayed but eagerly awaited debut release, Let It Move You.

Fortunately, the bones of this remarkable debut were laid down just before the pandemic, and some songs date back a few years; that said, the record is remarkably consistent and present, even as new ideas, collaborators, and Morgan’s spoken-word updates were added, along with voicemails from friends and a powerful pre-surgery pep talk voicemail from Scott. These communications, initially private, were a way for Morgan to feel support through an impossibly hard time..

“These songs, whenever they’re from, feel like they live together on this album,” says Scott. “There’s an existing throughline and deeper truths to what we do and what we talk about. So even with everything that happened, we kind of told the story before it happened.”

Let’s be clear: The Feelings Parade works wonderfully as a stripped-down duo, but the record has an expansive sound and a lot of guests — nearly 30 people participated in creating the album. “It’s always been about community building,” says Morgan. “We’re super grateful to be part of a very rich musical community. Cooperation is really part of the culture.”

“We ended up working with, I think, 29 musicians,” adds Scott. “It wasn’t just one core group — we got a very specific magic from different people. That’s why we’ll use, say, four different violinists.”

Let It Move You is a wonderfully diverse record, from the slow, beautiful harmonic build-up of album opener “The Tides” to the melancholy (and horns) that define “In Defense of Sadness.” From there, you’ll see that honesty and struggle at work: There’s both a song about the pains of dealing with grief (“Time for Tea”) and finding strength in the face of challenge  (“Strongest I Ever Felt,” a short interlude composed around one of Morgan’s delirious post-brain-surgery voice memo ramblings).

The record can be emotionally raw; as well, the live performances of The Feelings Parade feel cathartic. “Every word we sing we’ve poured over; it has to ring true,” says Scott. “And I think with this record, a lot of the feeling is — no wonder you’re hurting. It’s been unsafe to feel your feelings, from the time you were born. It’s about empathy. Let’s hurt together.”

Interestingly, The Feelings Parade was initially born out of two separate and solo musical projects, even though Scott and Morgan toured and played together frequently (they actually toured as separate acts on a tour called The Feelings Parade, which lead to the eventual moniker). Still, both musicians were on a very similar path, having left jobs and identities in order to dedicate their lives to music, and both came to each other with the commitment that, no matter what happened between them, music would come first.

“Other people saw what The Feelings Parade could be way before we did,” Scott admits. “At this one festival, where it was mainly musicians I really admire just playing for each other, a lot of people ended up describing us as their favorite band. We didn’t consider ourselves a band!”

The duo sometimes get labeled as West Coast folk, but that’s a fairly limited term. It’s more about two excellent songwriters, working both in tandem and with a big group of friends, to create harmony-rich music that’s grounded in familiar instruments but crosses over traditional

categories — with a painfully raw lyrical honesty at the forefront. “Production-wise, we were inspired by Latin American Magical Realism, where there’s a steady, believable and reliable world inside of which inexplicably magical occurrences happen,” says Scott, who also, in a lighthearted moment, also accurately describes their music as “heartfelt and groovy.”

Plans are now afoot for larger tours – as openers, with friends, on their own, however, the band can get out and share their music with their intensely dedicated fanbase (prior to the pandemic, the group had shared stages with Glen Hansard, Josiah Johnson of The Head and The Heart, Suzanne Ciani, MaMuse, Cassandra Lewis, Mirah, Graham Patzner, Mount Eerie, John Craigie and Rainbow Girls, among many others). “We were blown away by the response after our first show back,” says Morgan. “It was at the same club where we had first met. We got up on stage, and almost everyone in the audience sat down on the floor and was silent and cuddled up.”

“Between the pandemic and what happened to my brain, the real question was, do people know we still exist or care? And we had such a passionate response. If anything, our relationship with the audience deepened. It was so deeply affirming. It really infused us with belief about this project.”

If you want to really sum up The Feeling Parade, sit down with “A Lot to Hold,” the song where you can find the line that makes up the album’s title. “That song really came into its own our first few times performing it inside of prisons (Marion Correctional Institute and San Quentin) as part of Alive Inside, the You’re Going to Die project that we’re both a part of,” says Scott. “We knew that if the song didn’t ring true in that context, then it wasn’t doing its job.”

Adds Morgan: “There’s this line in the song, where we’re trying to describe the pain of living in this modern world: ‘The pain in your heart, that’s the truth moving through. Will you stomp it down, or let it move you?’ It’s about us having the choice to look away, to repress the things that hurt us. Instead, for us, it’s about being moved by those things in the direction of justice, equity and healing–it’s about letting that pain animate us toward creating a world that works for all of us.”