There are two unwritten laws in modern pop: Don’t get too political., and don’t write songs about currently pressing events. Five for Fighting’s mastermind John Ondrasik broke both those rules with his two latest singles: “Blood on Our Hands,” about the Afghanistan withdrawal and “Can One Man Save the World?” about Ukraine.
“I took no pleasure in writing those songs, for the first time in my life,” he said this week. “And I’d like to say I worked hard on the song about President Zelenskyy, but the fact is that I put no thought at all into it. I wrote it in such a hurry because I didn’t think he would survive the coming week. There’s a line at the end about him being dead or alive, and I wanted the song to exist beyond him.” The song will be featured when Five for Fighting play the Leader Bank Pavilion on Sunday, opening the Barenaked Ladies’ “Last Summer on Earth” tour.
Las summer Ondrasik traveled to Kyiv and performed the song with the Ukranian Orchestra; that session was captured on a video that’s gone viral. “I could talk to you for days about that. It took a couple of miracles for us to get there, and everyone in the orchestra had lost a loved one or had somebody missing. We’re playing in front of this plane with the nose cone shot off, with this onslaught of military coming at us. I’ll never forget the way the general just looked at us and said, ‘Let me hear your song’. Then the orchestra lifted their shoulders, stiffened their backs and started to play. These military guys are like 250 pound Rambos, and we could see them putting on their sunglasses because they were starting to cry. And then it hit me that nobody knew the words; even the orchestra didn’t speak English. All this emotion was just created through music.”
Ondrasik is no stranger to topical songwriting. His breakthrough hit “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” became an unofficial 9/11 anthem, though he wrote it for very different reasons. “It was really a selfish song, about hitting the brick wall of the music business and not being able to be heard — When you’re a 23 year old songwriter, ‘It’s not easy to be me’ makes sense, and that’s not a song I could write today. But when we did the Concert for New York and I watched The Who blow the roof off, it was an education in how music matters. It changed my perspective on how much there is beyond charts and ticket sales.”
There hasn’t been a full Five for Fighting album in 10 years, and fans may assume Ondrasik is too busy with his political activism. But in fact he runs an entirely different family business– and you have probably used it without realizing. “Our claim to fame is that we make the best shopping cart in the world. My dad is now 85 so I’ve had to take it over; I have 400 employees and I’ve worked on that my whole life. But lately we’ve changed the management, so I do hope to have time for another record — for folks who are still familiar with what records are.”
One feature of this tour is that both bands are closing their sets with beloved classic-rock cover tunes. And without giving away the title, Five for Fighting have chosen one that’s a little bit operatic. “What can I say, I’m a child of the ‘70s and those songwriters and classic rockers were part of my era. That song is a little tough to sing, because of course it starts as a piano ballad. We have moments of introspection on this tour, but for the most part t really is fun. And I have the most fun blowing my voice out at the end.”