Marrying drums, bass, guitar, tuba, ukulele, sax, trumpet, trombone and other wandering minstrels, the Foes of Fern carve out a segment in the music industry like a voluminous, awesome boulder.  Unique from start to finish, their music is hypnotic and gang-busting in every sense, initiating you as part of the tribe upon first down-beat.  A wall of sound thriving through each new moment on stage, feeling like the spontaneity of Hendrix while maintaining the rehearsed specialties in parts and orchestration reminiscent of the Beatles.  Recently releasing their new video for “Carpe Diem,” we had the honor to catch up with the band for an epic segment you can catch below!

Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically? 

This song is the oldest Foes of Fern song in our set. I wrote it back in 2011 and it was my final for my songwriting 101 class at Berklee. I got a solid B+ on it and then put it away for a while. We went to record the tune in 2016 and originally set out to just make it the normal bass, drums, and guitar rock song. By the 4th session we were adding different types of keyboards and stringed instruments like accordion and mandolin. We then decided to bring in a string section and from there it just became this goal of ours to make the song as big as possible. We built a mini orchestra track by track and 4 years later we were driving to Boston to record harp, the final instrument on the song. 

We wanted the video to stay in the same timeline as a few of our other music videos that we already had worked on. Decided to make it like a prequel in the story line. It was our goal to build a fantasy world for the first half of the story and then have that fantasy world crumble back into reality. It took about 6 months of pre production, 3 shoot days and a couple months of editing to get us to the final product and the whole team is so excited for the final piece of our little three song trilogy. 

What was the inspiration behind this video(visuals, storyline, etc.)? 

Disney and like all those over the top romantic comedies were the inspiration for the video. We wanted it to be as romantic and “perfect” as possible so we hired a choreographer, a makeup artist to come and fill in my bald spots, and partnered up with some amazing sponsors that gave us access to beautiful locations (thank you The Water Witch and The Borough of Highlands) some stunning jewelry (thank you Leonardo Jewelers) and food from Mogo kept us fueled all day. 

As for the storyline, we had great success with our first music video for “Bike Song” back in 2018 so we set out to continue that story with a sequel in our music video for “Ghost, Girl In All My Songs” and Carpe Diem became the prequel. We had a lot of fun little callbacks between all the videos. I hope someone out there takes the time to watch all three in a row one day haha.

What was the process of making this video?

The Process was long but so much fun! The team started out with Andrea Morgan, Rob Ciano, Bart Lentini and Ava Serene Portman. We did about 5 pre production sessions to build the three song storyline. Then we started to fill in the other roles. We brought in Delia Kemph, who we worked with on our Monkey music video, to do choreography for Carpe Diem. Michael Cappetto and Ale Valentia were brought on to play our young couple throughout the videos. Robin Dilapo was hired as our makeup artist and she made me so happy by giving me a perfect fake hairline. We added other cameramen and crew and extras and just had an absolute wild time filming all the scenes from April of 2019 to October of 2019. Now one year later, the fruits of all the labors are finally ready for us to enjoy. I’m so happy with the final product and grateful to everyone that  The filming of all our music videos is filled with fun little tidbits but I’ll just leave you with this one.
I knew in about November of 2018 that I wanted to do a ton of filming in 2019 so I set out on a meal plan and got a membership at a local crossfit gym (shout out to Ocean Athletics in Neptune) and dropped like 30 pounds for the videos. Since I wanted the videos to be like this fake “perfect” world I tried to be in the best shape possible for it. Funny enough, the cake eating scene in the Carpe Diem video was the first time that I had any type of ice cream or chocolate in over a year and you can watch me mouth the words “My stomach hurts so much”. I’ve since reverted back to my old ways of Taco Bell and Bagels. 

Find the group via:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheFoesOfFERN
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefoesoffern/?hl=en
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6paBX7yxQt55Xed4JPtZTO
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/the-foes-of-fern/1368653516
Website: https://thefoesoffern.wixsite.com/website?