Felix Rockey is a 20-year-old French singer based in Paris who picked up a guitar at nine and grew up between French and British cultures. Earlier this year, he released ‘Eos’, an independently produced debut EP on which he played every instrument himself. On ‘Old New Feelings’, his stage musicians join him in the studio, giving a deeply personal song a shared musical setting.
‘Old New Feelings’ suggests emotions returning with their original force, even after time has changed the circumstances. At twenty, Rockey is writing about an experience already several years behind him.
That distance adds an interesting perspective to the youthful urgency of the subject. Rockey wrote it over two years ago, after his second experience of falling in love ended in heartbreak. That detail gives the single its most interesting angle.
By the second time, you might expect to have developed some emotional expertise. Instead, another person arrives, the excitement takes over, and everything becomes urgent again. Rockey approaches that experience through a rock-infused love song concerned with the affection that survives a breakup. For Rockey, that seems a fitting way to move forward: keep the affection, give it some rock energy, and turn a difficult chapter into music worth sharing.
