Thoughts from Fe Fi Fo vocalist Jon (Papa) White: Ronnie Neuhauser and I have known each other for years. We would venture out to each other's shows, even splitting the bill at times. Ronnie was playing with his projects No Cheez Orchestra, a progressive band w/vocals, and his progressive Ronnie and I had several conversations, and found we had similar thoughts on music as an artform, and we agreed on many societal issues. Many times a conversation would end with "we ought to work on a project together". That idea did not come to fruition for quite some time. A couple of years ago Ronnie called me and said he'd started working with acoustic guitar and had come up with some interesting tunings. I told him I'd stop by. That was the beginning of Fe Fi Fo. On that night we developed the concepts for our first two compositions, "Life on Planet Earth", and "Be The One". I call them compositions because they really don't fit the standard structures of "a song". We like to think of them as having movements rather than just a verse and chorus. We are also experimenting with writing "pieces" with an overarching concept and forming these pieces into a suite. Our goal is to have each movement of the suite have the ability to stand on it's own as a piece of music. "The Machine" and "The Dance of Life" are two such "conceptual suites". Once we have a concept for a composition we let it run freely with no limitations on musical style, orchestration, etc. We try to integrate ideas drawing from all we have learned, or any new concept we can devise. Our only rule is that the music be sincere, what some have called "honest music", and that it be the best we can possibly make it. We respect the audience and look to take them on a journey with hopes of connecting on a deep, spiritual and intellectual level. Once the compositions started flowing we knew we needed to add other instrumentation to tell our story and we are very lucky to have the extremely talented Fred Melillo, and James Moss, to bring their talent, ideas, skills, and passion to Fe Fi Fo. Jon (Papa) White |