Simone Felice is a celebrated songwriter, author, and poet. He was born on 4 October 1976 in Palenville, New York, a tiny working-class hamlet in the Catskill Mountains. An intense twenty-five years was to follow – full of life-altering illness, poetry and punk bands – eventually leading him back home and to write songs with his brother Ian, just after the attacks on New York City in the Fall of 2001.

Together they retreated to the woods they grew up in, where jobless with a cheap guitar they wrote and made recordings (two archived collections know as The Big Empty and Mexico) with their friend Doc Brown. In this manner the two brothers clocked four years in complete obscurity, sewing the seeds of what would become (with the edition of younger brother James in the Winter of 2006) The Felice Brothers, whose subsequent albums Tonight at the Arizona, The Felice Brothers, and Yonder is the Clock have garnered international renown, earning these Upstate New York natives an inarguable place in the Great American Songbook. Over the group’s history, from starting out playing New York's subways and streets, to Radio City Music Hall and beyond.

In the winter of 2009 personal tragedy reared its head when Simone and his long-time love lost their first child in a still-birth. It was then that he retreated to a cabin in the Catskill’s with his old friend Bird and began writing and recording the songs that would (unknown to them at the time) become The Duke & The King’s album debut. Taking their name from the itinerant Shakespeare theatre grifters in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the duo released the gripping Nothing Gold Can Stay in the Summer of 2009 to critical acclaim, being hailed as one of the most haunting and honest albums of the year. 2010's follow-up Long Live The Duke & The King has been similarly praised, incorporating the voices of friends Simi Stone and Nowell Haskins to realize their own special twist on the classic idea of a 'singing band'.

Simone now lives less than a mile from the creek-house he was born in, and is currently working on his self-titled solo debut, due out in early 2012; all-the-while traveling his own country and abroad sharing his songs and stories.