In May of 2010, singer-songwriter Simon Felice should have been feeling on leading of the world. His band The Duke &amp the King was preparing to release their second album Long Reside the Duke &amp the King, the stick to-up to 2009’s critically admired Practically nothing Gold Can Remain, And Felice’s wife was heavily pregnant with their initial little one, a double blessing given the couple had previously suffered a late-term miscarriage the preceding yr.

But Felice, who very first gained a following playing alongside his siblings in folk-rock act The Felice Brothers, was not feeling on best of the planet in the early summer of 2010. In reality, he was feeling like hell warmed over. “If you look at pictures of me, I was just pale and grey,” says the singer, 35, more than the mobile phone from his property “on a cliff” in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains. “I did not have insurance, I never ever went to the physician. I did not know it, but I was little by little dying.”

Felice is not speaking metaphorically. Immediately after suffering a string of fainting spells, the singer finally sought health-related guidance and was informed that he essential rapid heart surgical procedure to rectify a congenital defect that was severely decreasing blood flow to his brain.  “They told me, Mr Felice, there’s no health-related explanation why you are even now alive, you need to have emergency open heart surgery tomorrow,” he says.

Felice was admitted to Albany Medical Center in upstate New York in which, on June 2, his chest was cracked open and an irreversibly calcified aortic valve was swapped for a mechanical replacement.  “My wife was eight months pregnant with our first kid,” he says. “They wheeled me away on a gurney and I had to say goodbye [to her], and say goodbye to her belly and never ever know if I would see my child.”

He would. Felice “busted out” of the Medical Center immediately after just a number of days of convalescence—“Hospital is the final place I want to be when I’m not feeling well”—and his daughter, Pearl, was born a month later.  “We had her up right here in the mountains with a midwife,” he says. “I cut the cord and I was just robust sufficient to choose her up. She looked me in the eye and it was virtually like a rebirth. It was like I was born the exact same moment she was born. I wrote the song ‘You &amp I Belong,’ the same day.”

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Alo Ceballos/FilmMagic

Beyonce in Manhattan Monday evening.

Nowadays M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, debuted her video for new single “Bad Girls,” working yet again with “Born Free” co-conspirator Romain Gavras. Filmed in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the country’s film capital also seen in “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Gladiator” and many other Western motion pictures, the video is meant to evoke a Persian Gulf landscape – dusty, baked, semi-apocalpytic and in the hands of M.I.A. and Gavras, utterly challenging-core.

Set to M.I.A.’s Punjabi-laced chill-banger, “Bad Girls” is a lady gangsta fantasy but one particular that plays off quite true substances from lifestyle in the Middle East. There is crumbled architecture, sustained over many years of attack smouldering oil tankards young males in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously bored mysterious women covered from head to toe, with only their kohl-lined eyes flashing out. Most of us Americans have noticed that existence only in bits of CNN video, left to venture our very own conclusions about their day-to-day grind.

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