Peter Broderick presents new project The White Mages with debut album Ode to Final Fantasy. An album celebrating the music of the legendary Japanese video game series, with 11 new recordings of Broderick’s favourite songs, from the much-loved ‘Aerith’s Theme’ to deeper cuts such as ‘Hymn of the Fayth’ and ‘Eternity, Memory of Light Waves’. The album is out digitally from March 20 on Erased Tapes Music, with first single ‘The Prelude’ out now.

Broderick’s own music origin story is intimately tied to the Final Fantasy series. As a child, he was obsessed with the seventh instalment in the series, known as FFVII to fans. His mother, the poet/musician Selah Broderick, promised she’d gift him a PlayStation if he practiced the violin for 100 days in a row. An eager young Broderick took his mother up on this offer, and as he improved on the violin, he was given the PlayStation as promised. In his own words, “I learned to play music because of my drive to play video games”.

The White Mages’ name is a tribute to the original series composer, Nobuo Uematsu, who had his own band called The Black Mages that played rock’n’roll versions of songs from the games back in the day. In the world of Final Fantasy it’s the Black Mages who use offensive magic like fire and lightning, while the White Mages are the healers. Each and every note on Ode to Final Fantasy was played and sung by Broderick himself, but the project is intended to be open to other fans of the series. Perhaps one day Broderick will be just one of many White Mages within a larger group, casting Cure upon the world by playing the music of Final Fantasy.

During the pandemic, Broderick secretly started playing the video games again, and secretly started listening to their soundtracks, and secretly watched videos of people talking about the games, which resulted in feeling it was all a guilty pleasure. Over time though, Broderick came to realise the games genuinely spoke to him – the stories, the characters, and above all, the music. After quietly dreaming for years about recreating some of the music from these games, in 2025 Broderick started to act.

Once he got started, it all just poured through. He delighted in breathing new life into the work of Uematsu, along with other composers from the series, Noriko Matsueda and Masashi Hamauzu. Some songs (’Freya’s Theme’, ‘Under the Rotting Pizza’) are note-for-note recreations of the original game music, while others are more Broderick’s own personal interpretations (‘Melodies of Life’, ‘Chocobo Theme’).

Erased Tapes and Broderick pledge to donate half of all proceeds from the album to Doctors Without Borders. Adding to this, Broderick says, “As I began to share this project with friends, someone close to me suggested donating some of the proceeds to a real-world cause. To take this world of fantasy and escapism and bring it into our broken, sad and beautiful world with some tangible consequence. I felt it was a very good idea, taking what was already a very meaningful project to me and imbuing it with even more meaning and purpose.”