Decades after his first hits, John Ondrasik is still finding new inspiration to create songs for Five For Fighting. And while the music he creates under the moniker is soft rock, he often uses it to deal with hard truths.
Case in point is his newest track, “Sleepy Song,” which he is playing on his string quartet tour, which comes to City Winery in New York on Oct. 11. He wrote the song with actor Gary Sinise, who lost his son to cancer at 30 years old a few years ago.
“Gary’s son was a composer, and he’d written all these kind of melodies and lyrics,” Ondrasik says of the actor in a recent phone interview. “So Gary sent me a few musical ideas and some lyrics, I put together this song.”
The string quartet format gives Ondrasik the opportunity to bring in a new selection like “Sleepy Song” but is mostly a platform for reworked well-known tunes and deeper cuts that will please hardcore fans of his work.
“I think string symphonies bring a different dynamic to your music,” who first played live with a symphony about 20 years ago. “One of my favorite things to do when making records is arranging string parts, I’ve also worked with just incredibly talented arrangers who’ve kind of educated me on the craft. I mean, the song’s the song, and you still have to have the song.
“I love my rock band. They’re some of the best players in the world. But it’s a completely different thing with classical instruments, and it takes you a minute to kind of to get used to it. Particularly the orchestra is challenging because every orchestra is different, every conductor is different. You literally have one rehearsal, you do the whole set and then you do the show, and particularly with the rhythm sections, it can be a little challenging.
“But the folks I have now, we’ve been doing it now for so long, it’s like riding a bike. And they love playing rock music. They play eight Broadway shows a week and that can get a little tedious, I don’t care what show you’re on. But they play jazz, they play rock, they play folk, they play everything. So again, I think playing with that level of musicianship was something I hadn’t really experienced before.”
The members of the Five for Fighting string quartet are Katie Kresek (violin and musical director), Melissa Tong (violin), Chris Cardona (viola). and Peter Sachon (cello).
Kresek has collaborated with artists such as David Byrne, Lana del Rey and Trey Anastasio in addition to her work on Tony Award-winning work on Broadway, where she was concertmaster and co-orchestrator of “Moulin Roge! The Musical.”
At the time of our interview in mid-August, Ondrasik said Kresek was in the middle of orchestrating the Five For Fighting songs “The Day I Died” and “65 Mustangs” while running a music camp in France.
“First of all, it’s a joy because she is a wonderful person and she’s so much fun,” Ondrasik says of Kreske. “Take the whole music thing away, and I’d still like to go across the country with her and Melissa and Peter and Chris, because we just have so much fun. She’s so talented. I remember I wrote a song for Ukraine called ‘Can One Man Save the World?’ and I had the opportunity to go to Ukraine to record it with the Ukrainian Orchestra, but we were advised that if you tell anybody, it’s not going to happen because there’s so much security and all this stuff. And we had like a week to arrange the orchestra.
“So we were in the back of this Sprinter van traveling across America, and I was on one side kind of arranging my and then she’ll take it to another level and do all the orchestrations. So we had very limited time to do this, so we were getting it done and she’s doing all this stuff on her computer, and we get the charts done, we send it over there, and then I get on a plane, and then she gets up at 4 in the morning to get on a Zoom with Ukraine and record the orchestra while I’m getting there. To watch her in real time, they’re so good and they’re just like magicians and I learn a lot from them.”
That work resulted in Ondrasik playing with the Ukrainian musicians at the ruins of an airport in 2022, and the video of the performance was debuted on “Good Morning America.” Performing in war-torn hotspots has become a hallmark of Five For Fighting, with visits to places like Hostage Square in Tel Aviv in 2024.
“It doesn’t make my wife happy, particularly Ukraine. She wasn’t happy about that. I was very grateful she let me go,” says Ondrasik. “When I go to these places, particularly Ukraine, I don’t bring the quartet with me. Some of them would certainly go, but I feel kind of responsible for them. I go with kind of a crew, a production crew, and most of them are former military and stuff. I think going to Israel, you feel a little bit better because of the Iron Dome, but I happened to be there the first night Iran attacked, and I was scared, and in Ukraine there were some missile launchers. In Ukraine, you have to go to the basement of any hotel you’re in. There’s no safe rooms like there are in Israel. In Ukraine, you never really sleep. I remember when we got back after five or six days, we all slept for like 24 hours because you’re nervous and you really don’t sleep well there. It actually gives you perspective on the people who live there who have to deal with this every day now for years. But they still have to go to school or go to work, go get their laundry done, go to the grocery store. It just gives you a certain insight.
“My wife would not let me go to Afghanistan. I don’t blame her for that, and I’m glad I did not. That that was in the cards for a minute there.”
Ondrasik’s performed his anthem “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” at the base of the twin beams during the 9/11 Memorial & Museum 25th Anniversary Tribute in Light special on September 11, a chapter in his advocacy that does not draw any blowback, but he is not afraid to put himself in the line of critical fire when addressing more controversial topics in his many media appearances. In August, he wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which he defended Boy George, who faced backlash for his pro-Israel song.
“For my whole life, musicians had no problem speaking out om issues on either side,” Ondrasik says. “At The Concert for New York I was moved and grateful to be with basically every living icon supporting America after the attacks of 9-11 and speaking out against bin Laden, and of course Sun City and Live Aid and you go through all those things. And did I always agree with every comment by the media, by every musician? Of course not. But that’s I think one thing that’s so disturbing and depressing about this latest October 7th kind of aftermath in the arts is the silence, and many times people, kind of in my mind, standing with the terrorists. So I think for me I’m kind of inspired by people that aren’t in the arts these days, because the arts are not very inspiring. People like Patricia Heaton, an actress, she was on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ she’s been very vocal. Debra Messing, who’s become a friend of mine. And you notice those two people come from totally different sides of the political sphere, which to me, this has nothing to do with politics. Even sports people. I think anybody who speaks up when there’s a cost is someone that I appreciate.”
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