Photo of John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting by Carpe Tempus Photography
Five for Fighting with String Quartet | w/ Lace & Lee | 04.29.25, 7:30pm | City Winery, 3730 Foundry Way | All ages | $48–$65
John Ondrasik— the songwriter and performer known as the platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Five for Fighting, with hits such as “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” and “100 Years”—brings his unique Americana storytelling to St. Louis on Tuesday, April 29,2025 at the City Winery at the Foundry. Ondrasik and his piano will be backed at this special show by a string quartet to give his passionate songs an entirely different flavor.
The Arts STL conducted the following interview with Ondrasik in anticipation of this upcoming show.
Zach Johnson: Thanks for your time today, John.
John Ondrasik: Sure.
My name is Zach. I’m a writer and filmmaker close to St. Louis. And I’ve invited my mom and dad, Nicole and Jeff Johnson.
Hi, mom and dad. Hey, Zach.
So, when I was a kid, your albums, America Town, Battle for Everything, Two Lights, these were played very regularly in my household. My dad is retired Navy. And so, he both loves your music and is very honored by the humanitarian causes you’re involved with.
A pleasure to meet you all, and thank you for your service to our nation, and it’s an honor to support all military families.
I’m interested in your creative process, so I wanted to first ask: you’re embarking on a tour with a string quartet and have done so for several years now. What is most creatively fulfilling to you about reinterpreting your original work in a new form with new collaborators?
Well, that’s a great way to put it. I think when you have songs that you been fortunate enough to play 10 thousand, 15 thousand times, you’re always kind of looking for new ways to present them and keep them fresh for yourself.
And it really started ten years ago or so, I started being asked to do some symphony shows, which was so inspiring to me to have a full symphony behind me. And not just for, like, the popular songs. It’s nice to hear “Superman” and “100 Years” with the symphony. But I’ve also been blessed to work with incredible composers, who’ve written these amazing arrangements, to songs like “Nobody” and “Devil in the Wishing Well,” songs that are kind of deeper cuts. So just to be able to play those songs with an orchestra and now a quartet, not only kind of provides something new for the popular songs, but they allow me to expand my catalog.
Certainly, it’s different songs than I would play in a rock set. So, it keeps it fresh. And the musicianship of the players is so inspiring. They’re all prodigy players, Broadway players. Katie [Kresek], my violinist, won a Tony award.
So, as a musician, just to sit there and watch them as a fan from the piano also is inspiring. And the nice thing about the quartet shows, too: it’s much different than a rock club, of course, or an outdoor, 10 thousand-seat venue stadium. It’s very intimate. It’s pin drop. You have, I think, a different relationship with the audience.
You can literally have conversations with the audience, and people can request songs. And you can do much more of a storytelling show—which I like when I see my favorite artist, I like to hear where they were when they wrote the song or where that came from or a funny story from the road. So, I really the dynamic of doing these intimate, very musical shows, and then go down with the rock band during the summer.
It keeps them all fresh.
Right? Every time you rotate over, you’re kind of, like, ready for that next experience. So that’s a long answer to your question. And, of course, they’re all family members too. So, you just have the camaraderie that goes along with it.
Expanding on that, your opener, Lace and Lee, has a very personal connection to you. I was curious as a parent, were you heavily involved in your daughter [Olivia’s] musical journey, or is that something that came organically for her by absorbing your creative process and work?
No. She’s always had the bug. Music’s always been her passion and acting. As of five years old, she was Annie in Annie in the local theater.
She’s always dreamed of going to, musical theater school in New York. We saw Wicked 17 times before she was 14. She lived that dream she went to NYU and she did theater.
But her passion now is songwriting. And certainly, like any parent, you’re always a little nervous when your children pick the arts, which is obviously a struggle and there’s no guarantee. But I’ve always been like, “If you have the passion for it, go for it.” And she’s a hard worker, and she’s very humble. And when we do when Olivia and Caroline [Lace], who [was] her friend from NYU, do open for us.
We never tell anybody she’s my daughter. You find out during my set because she comes out and sings. But that was that was on her. She’s like, don’t tell anybody. I need to earn this.
And her solo work is just incredible. And I’m hardly involved at all. I mean, she’s a much better songwriter than I am, at her age, and she’s a great little producer. So, I certainly will give my comments here and there, but she’s well on her way. And I’m so proud of her, and my son too. He can play a great guitar, but that’s not his thing, so he chose not to do that.
But, yeah, it’s singing “I Just Love You,” [which] I wrote inspired by my conversation with Olivia when she was four years old, and now she’s twenty-three—I still try to not choke up when we do that on this tour. But people love them, and they get a standing ovation, and it has nothing to do with me. And, for folks who are coming to the show, I think they’ll see that.
It can be really tempting for artists to want to tinker away at a project forever. You’re always kind of, like, “It’s not quite right,” or whatever. So how do you determine for yourself when a song is complete? Is it more like, “That’s as good as I’ll get this piece before my deadline,” or more instinctually like, “Okay. This feels whole.”
That’s a very good question.
I think it applies probably more to albums, making a record like we used to do. People don’t really do that anymore. But your kind of want to just go forever because you’re like, “Well, I can make it better, and I have another song,” and the business forces you at some point to stop. Though, when I did [2004’s] The Battle for Everything, we recorded basically the whole record, and we kind of knew we didn’t have a follow-up to “Superman,” so we kept going back to the drawing board till we got “100 Years.”
But songs, I typically have a good sense of when songs that reach their end point. Some come very quickly. Like, when I wrote “Superman,” I wrote it very quickly, and I only added an extra two lines—I doubled up the pre-hook and the second verse. And that one, I kind of knew. “Okay. I think that’s there.”
“The Riddle,” took, like, a year, and I kept going back to that song. And I still feel I didn’t really get it to where it needed to be even though people really like that song. It was more lyrically: that was a challenging lyric song. So some songs you just keep going back to the drawing board and going back, and at some point, either time [runs out] or you basically just kind of give up. But, yeah, some songs present themselves like, “Okay. That’s it.” But also, you have some advisors too, and you have a close team who kind of give their twocents too.
And I do that with Olivia a bit sometimes too. I’m like, “That’s great. And that one, maybe there’s something more you can do with it.” But it is a really hard thing because as the writer of the song, you [are] also kind of the editor of the song, too. And those are completely two different things.
And sometimes you need to take a few weeks away from a song and then come back with a fresh outlook, and you’ll hear, “Okay, what I thought was totally working was not, or what I thought was not working is working.” So the song, it’s like any artistic process. I know people who’ve been writing a book for twenty years.
I’ve worked on a musical for three years. It didn’t end up happening, but I understand that you can get—there’s this fear. This is what I think: there’s this fear that, if it’s [for] you, if you don’t finish it, you don’t have to play it for anybody. Because if you play it for somebody, they may not like it. And then you must deal with that. So I always tell young artists—they’ve shopped, like, their three songs for years, and I’m like, “You need to be writing 200 songs a year, not shopping.” You need to be writing songs. You need to be putting out content. You need to be writing every day. And you can’t get stuck in this in this kind of morass that I think can happen.
And it’s not just musicians. It’s writers. It’s artists. It’s just kind of the artistic process. It’s easy to not finish, because then you don’t have to get the feedback or you don’t have to show it to the world.
Right.
Yeah. It’s tough not to be too precious with your work because in a way, that’s the feeling that brought you to the work in the first place, typically. Right? It’s like you had this passion for something. I’m not sure a lot of artists [are] making it for themselves most of all.
You’ve written several songs that have become cultural touchstones during significant world events–whether you intended them to connect in that way [or not]. So, for you, especially being so involved in humanitarian causes, how do you balance your creative integrity with potential broader sociopolitical impacts of your art?
Yeah, I’ve always written songs about our troops and their families because I saw very early in my career how music mattered to our soldiers, particularly in theater, how they use music for their wellness, whether to pump themselves up for a mission or detach afterwards or be able to go to sleep or whatever it is. So I’ve always written and been honored to perform for our soldiers and our troops, but I’ve never been someone who likes to stand on my soapbox and preach my political views. I find that kind of annoying whenever [people] do that. But there’s certainly a history of musicians writing about the world around them.
And a few years ago, when we had the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I have a lot of friends who are Afghan vets who are gutted by the fact that we abandoned their allies to the Taliban, and that the fact that our government was claiming it was some kind of success made me very angry. And I wrote “blood on My Hands,” and it became a song that was very important for our veterans who felt voiceless. And so that gave me some courage, I think, and some satisfaction in that, okay, this song will never get one spin on the radio and the music press will hate it, but there’s an audience out there that’s very meaningful to me that finds something important in the song. And similar with the Ukraine song [“Can One Man Save the World”] and the latest, Israel song [“Superman (For Alon, The Hostages, and Their Families)”]. I never expected Israel to share my song on social media, and it’s become this kind of global lightning rod.
But I’m very humbled by the fact that so many people who feel abandoned—because they have been—can listen to that song and go, “Okay, some people get it.” And, and it’s very meaningful, especially to kids who are on these college campuses. It’s odd that, again, these are songs that the music press typically disdains, but it’s also songs that have found their way to culture like virtually none of my other songs have—except for “100 Years” and “Superman” that have gotten tens of millions of impressions. So, I think it just goes to show you how music can cut through the noise like nothing else can and can give people a solace, or give people a feeling that somebody hears them in a way nobody else can.
I wish I didn’t have to write these songs. I take no joy in doing it. I don’t like singing about these horrible things. But, again, I think I feel a responsibility of speaking my mind on these issues. But I never could have imagined the response, both positive and negative.
I imagine something that’s nice for you is taking a storytelling approach in your music allows you to say things with a lighter touch that’s not so alienating to half your audience. Like you said, you can’t say things too directly because sometimes people can take that and run with it.
It’s a good point. I was speaking the other day about this, that I think a song can be worth more than a thousand speeches or a thousand op-eds. Because when people listen to music, I think they’re more open. They’re more compassionate. They’re more willing to listen.
And not always, but in my shows, when I play “Blood on My Hands” or I play “Can One Man Save the World,” I put it into the context of why I wrote this—this is about human rights, moral values. You may not agree with me, but this is where it comes from. And when people hear that, even though they may not agree with my sentiment or my view, they listen. And at the end of it for most of the time, at the end of the song, they’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t agree with you, but I hear where you’re coming from,” instead of just like, “I hate you. You’re evil.” So I think that’s one of the beautiful things about music. And I find that too: if I’m listening to somebody singing a protest song about something that I don’t agree with, a lot of times I’ll listen more, and I’ll think about, okay, I hear where they’re coming from, and maybe we can have a conversation about this. I think that’s unique to music, and I think that’s why it can be so profound. Sure. It seems to come more often from a place of vulnerability and intimacy than it does from propaganda or to push people a certain way.
Beyond writing and performing music, what are some routines or practices in your everyday life that help you to maintain your enthusiasm for what you’re doing even when you might be burnt out by it?
Well, I have a weird life. I have another side of my life that’s frankly, consuming, as much or more than music. We have a family business that’s been in the family since the forties, a manufacturing business. My grandfather started it.
My dad’s been running it, and I’ve worked there since I was a kid. It’s called Precision Wire. We make shopping carts. If you shop at Costco, we make their shopping carts. So I have this other side of my life that has nothing to do with music, which is, I think, pretty grounding, and takes up a lot of my time.
And so, when I come back to music, music is kind of my escape and my—I would say my happy place, but it basically takes the rest of the world and throws it away and puts me back into my music world.
And I’m a swimmer. I try to swim a lot because I find that really helps my mental wellness and just my brain. My daughter, Olivia, she’s very into meditation and practices that keep you healthy. And being a being a songwriter or a writer, it’s kind of tormenting. Most people who do it are tormented. They’re writing or they’re singing because there’s something they want to say, and it’s usually something that bothers them.
I also just try to keep my health up and do things—I think doing physical things [is] important, whether it’s running or swimming or moving or hiking. I think you got to keep your body moving. You got to have healthy practices and have things outside of music. We can take ourselves so seriously.
And the great thing about kind of my career is when I was really in the middle of it, my kids were young, and if something bad happened, if a single didn’t go or we didn’t sell any tickets or somebody wrote a mean review, you come home and you have young kids, and you’re like, they don’t care.
It’s like, life is too short, and these things we think are big things are little things. Keeping a perspective of, at the end of the day, it’s just a song, and it’s just somebody’s opinion. And there’s much bigger things that are going on that that that we can think about.
But also, at my age now—I just turned sixty—I don’t have the pressure of writing a hit. I can do what I want to do. So I think a lot of the pressure that I felt as a young artist or young writer trying to be heard, that’s in the past, and I’m kind of back to where I was when I was, like, 14 or 15 [and] I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wrote about what mattered that day. And that’s what I’m doing now. I don’t have the deadline. I don’t have to write a song today. But if something happens where I’m like, I want to say something, I can.
And that’s a pretty nice place to be as an artist. The money and the recognition are nice, but it’s essentially like, “Can I maintain this creativity and this fire that I had when I first started out?”
Yeah. I think that’s what everybody aspires to, right? It’s like, I had nothing but my music and my brain and pain.
We’re looking forward to seeing you at the City Winery in Saint Louis on April 29. Thanks for sitting down with us for a little bit. Well, I look forward to meeting you all. I love Saint Louis. Your hockey team keeps beating up on my LA Kings, which is not fair. But, a great sports town, great music town. We always have a good time, and yeah. We’ll see you in a few weeks! | Zach Johnson
For more information, visit citywinery.com/st-louis!
FIVE FOR FIGHTING STRING QUARTET TOUR DATES:
04.25.25 – Lawrence, KS at Liberty Hall
04.26.25 – Omaha, NE at The Admiral
04.27.25 – Wichita, KS at The Cotillion Ballroom
04.29.25 – St. Louis, MO at City Winery St. Louis
04.30.25 – McMinnville, TN at Park Theater
05.02.25 – Cincinnati, OH at The Ludlow Garage
05.03.25 – Pontiac, MI at The Flagstar Strand Theatre
05.04.25 – Akron, OH at Goodyear Theater
05.07.25 – Nashville, TN at City Winery Nashville
05.09.25 – Charlotte, NC at Neighborhood Theatre
05.13.25 – Atlanta, GA at City Winery Atlanta
05.14.25 – Newberry, SC at Newberry Opera House
05.17.25 – Pittsburgh, PA at City Winery Pittsburgh
05.19.25 – Annapolis, MD at Rams Head On Stage
05.20.25 – Alexandria, VA at The Birchmere
FIVE FOR FIGHTING WITH VERTICAL HORIZON TOUR DATES:
08.13.25 – Columbus, OH at TempleLive at the Columbus Athenaeum
08.14.25 – St. Charles, IL at The Arcada Theatre
08.16.25 – Oklahoma City, OK at Scissortail Park (Free Show)
08.17.25 – Dallas, TX at Bomb Factory
08.19.25 – Arvada, CO at Arvada Center Summer Concert Series
08.20.25 – Grand Junction, CO at Avalon Theatre
08.22.25 – Salt Lake City, UT at The Union
08.23.25 – Boise, ID at Knitting Factory Concert House
08.24.25 – Spokane, WA at Knitting Factory Concert House
