Hi everybody, Sheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of the Sheryl Ackison

podcast. Today we'll hear from singer-songwriter John Androssik, better known as Phi for fighting,

on his remarkable trip to Ukraine to record a music video in the middle of a war zone.

As the war between Russian Ukraine drags on, our attention span is short, but there's

still much to be told. An unlikely storyteller in this conflict is singer-songwriter John

Androssik, better known as Phi for fighting, with giant hits like Superman, 100 years, and

so many more. He really felt moved by current events to take action, and for him that meant

writing about it, and then figuring out a way to get into war-torn Ukraine to record

his moving song with Ukrainian orchestra. The results are an incredible video, which you

can hear on Spotify or on his website, and see on YouTube and on his website. I'll put

a link in the description to this podcast, and I will play the song as part of the podcast,

but the story of how he got into Ukraine and what he saw is so interesting, so here he

is to tell it. So you have a new music video out, which is the song that we played here

some months ago when you first recorded it. And my first thought when I looked at the music

video was thinking of today's technology, it must have been a mix of you singing from

a studio and playing from a studio mixed in with this amazing Ukrainian orchestra, and

then I read that you were actually there in the war zone. Take us from the beginning and

tell us how that came about.

Cheryl, it actually started with Afghanistan. As you know, I'd written Blood on My Hands

about Afghanistan, and through that, I'd become acquaintances and friends, and frankly

embedded with some of these private groups rescuing abandoned allies and American citizens.

One of the groups I came across was a group called Save Our Allies, and we were starting

...