The impression left by much of today’s pop music is that many people just don’t like one another. There’s the rampant anger of nu-metal, the misogyny of rap and the sniping among some teen idols.
So it’s refreshing when an album such as Five for Fighting’s “The Battle of Everything” arrives, offering an air of optimism amid the negativity.
“I’m a big fan of humanity. I have a lot of faith in people,” says John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, which is essentially a one-man band with extra studio and tour personnel added when needed.
The name Five for Fighting may sound portentous, but it’s really a hockey term that refers to a penalty. The tongue-in-cheek moniker isn’t meant to define Ondrasik, a heavy thinker whose new, introspective album came out this week.
The CD is the first new release from Ondrasik since Five for Fighting’s post-9/11 hit, “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” a fragile piano ballad that in fact was written before the tragedy but that was adopted by firefighters and other emergency workers at the site.
The success of “Superman” propelled Five for Fighting’s “American Town” album to platinum sales–and helped finance the new disc, which was produced by Bill Bottrell at his seaside studio in Mendocino, Calif., where “I could look out and see whales go by,” Ondrasik says.
The placid setting is reflected in the music, which ranges from melodic, electro-acoustic rock to pretty, string-laden ballads about love and other issues of the heart. There’s a look-back 9/11 song in “Infidel” (with the line “heaven fell from the sky tonight … here we go … I didn’t ask for it”), but otherwise the album is a tight-knit treatise on family and, dare we sound maudlin, brotherhood.
“I still have a lot of friends among the firefighters and emergency workers, but that’s good,” Ondrasik says. “And I still get a lot of e-mails from them. They enlightened me on the spirit of the common man and helped me realize that terrible things may happen, but the weather report is good.”
The album’s first single is “100 Years,” a biographical sketch of a life from childhood through old age. It’s a meditative piano piece with what could be Ondrasik’s credo: “The sun is getting high/We’re moving on.”
Show stop
Five for Fighting plays a sold-out Valentine’s Day show at Schuba’s.
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Edited by Curt Wagner ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])