Felly is a rising hip-hop star with deep lyrics and Conn. roots
Afew days before Christmas, a seasonal tradition went down at Toad’s Place in New Haven when ascendant hip-hop performer Felly (aka Christian Felner) performed for his home-state fans shortly after dropping his latest album, Bad Radio.
A narrative of love, loss and the reality that we’re all ultimately alone, the title song opens like this: “Long ways to go / Daylight low / I wonder if I’ll get there / Sun hanging low / Unpaved roads / Run as fast as you can / Woah, twelve below / Chills my bones / Smoking on a spliff again (oh-oh, oh-oh) / Bad radio / Help my soul (my soul) ….”
The friends and fans who came out to hear Felly at Toad’s loved the show. “Toad’s is a venue I grew up going to. I remember taking the train there when I was in high school,” Felly says a few days later after the show by phone from his family’s home in Trumbull, where he grew up. “The show was amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to come back every year and it’s packed out.”
Felly, who’s 27 and lives in L.A., feels most at home on the West Coast, but Connecticut is his taproot in a complicated mix of influences and emotions, with family at the heart of everything. His “Connecticut smalltown upbringing” involved losing his father to cancer when Felly was 8, after which his mother married a friend and neighbor, who had lost his wife to cancer. He became the youngest of five in the blended family “with a lot of grieving kids,” but feels blessed to have a big family and cherishes his annual Christmas visits.
Felly counts his grandmother, Carol Jacobson, a Fairfield artist, as an inspiration and has her self-portrait tattooed on his arm. The woods and weather of Connecticut are another foundational influence. “Connecticut’s always had dramatic weather. It’s one of the reasons I left, but one of the reasons I admire it so much. You get every season to its fullest,” Felly says.“Art to me is essentially a reflection of nature. … The polarities and extremities of the seasons here have led me to be holistic and well-rounded with my sound and create not just sunny summer sounds but contrast.”
Bad Radio, Felly’s first album as an independent artist after he left 300 Entertainment, circles back to his childhood love of the outdoors and organic instrumentation, his publicist Nancy Lu says. This isn’t hip-hop of brags and assertions. Instead, Felly, who currently works with a four- or five-piece band, is deeply introspective, and there’s a pop-style lyricism to his recent work.
“I think hip-hop is in my makeup and kind of what comes naturally to me, so hip-hop is always going to be there,” he says. “I have been compared to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. [Lead singer Anthony Kiedis is] flowing, but because of how it’s delivered, you don’t necessarily see it like that.”
Being back at home has Felly looking back in other ways, too. “Last night I was playing a bit of my old record, Mariposa, made in a dark time. If you can forget the fact that it’s you and just listen to it, that was something I was really digging,” Felly says. “With Bad Radio it’s something similar. That’s something I’m going to look back on as capturing a piece of time.”
Mariposa is notable for the song “Heartstrings” and the boost that came from it. Sometime after the album came out in 2019, Carlos Santana heard the track and had his team reach out to Felly. “They called one day and said, ‘Carlos heard this and wants to see if you’re free in the next few days and come up to the studio in northern California.’ I went up there and Carlos said, ‘I love this song and I want to play on it,’ and he played guitar on it throughout. That was something I really needed and appreciated on my end.”
Felly’s music career began when he started making beats on a MPC500 music-production machine in his early teens, inspired by a wide range of artists, from Rage Against the Machine to The Beatles, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne. He went on to study music at the University of Southern California. Along with a few collaborators at USC, Felly put out albums and mixtapes, eventually gaining enough notice to headline nationwide tours. After a time in Brooklyn, he’s now back in L.A.
At this point in his career, Felly has accumulated more than 1 million monthly listeners, more than 300 million streams across various platforms, sells out his tours, and has received critical praise from Billboard, GRAMMY.com, XXL, Hypebeast and others. Despite all that, Felly doesn’t think he’s had a “hit” yet, but credits himself with “medium strong efforts” that have built his brand over the years, saying, “My progression has been made up of consistent moments.”
The nature of those moments might shift quickly, though.
“I want to be touring for the next 40, 50 years if I’m lucky. I look up to people like Peter Frampton and John Fogerty,” Felly says at one point in our conversation, though also adding of his work,
“If I’m in a storytelling world right now, I’m going to run from it because I don’t like to be one thing.”
Later he adds, “I don’t even know if music is my endgame. If not music, maybe painting, art, movies, something creative. … I don’t like repeating myself. It’s just letting life wash over you and seeing what sticks and what’s calling for something to be made.”