Five for One: Five for Fighting coming to Wild Adventures

Jul. 11—VALDOSTA — Asking which member of Five For Fighting you'll be interviewing shows an immediate ignorance of the act.

The PR rep response is simple and instructive: "Five For Fighting is John Ondrasik so just him!"

The creator of Top 40 hits such as "Superman (It's Not Easy)," "The Riddle" and "100 Years" isn't so much a band — though he has a back-up band — but a singer/songwriter with a band name.

Five for Fighting plays Saturday evening, along with Del Amitri and Barenaked Ladies, at Wild Adventures Theme Park.

In a phone interview with The Valdosta Daily Times, Ondrasik said coming up playing music in the late 1990s was an age of the Lilith Fair, grunge and boy bands. Producers told him "singer/songwriters was kinda '70s and dead. ... They said you need a band name."

A hockey fan and to kind of poke fun at the ridiculous nature of being a solo act asked to create a band name, Ondrasik said he chose Five for Fighting, a hockey term for the penalty for participating in a fight on the ice.

Ondrasik expected the name to be shot down. Instead, they loved it and so Ondrasik became Five for Fighting.

The name created early confusion in booking tours.

Though a melodic singer/songwriter of pop songs, Five for Fighting "sounds like I should be opening for Metallica," Ondrasik said. "I was booked into a lot of heavy metal shows. ... You can imagine, I'm sitting up there with my organ playing 'Superman.'"

He said being John Ondrasik won't open any doors for him like Five for Fighting will but being John Ondrasik allows him a certain amount of anonymity while traveling and in his daily life.

Still, he is not alone.

He refers to his back-up band as the "A-team," with members who play in different bands because Ondrasik/Five for Fighting doesn't play all of the time.

Ondrasik said he tries to avoid talking politics as a performer on stage or in interviews. But he traveled to Ukraine last year and performed his song "Can One Man Save the World?" with the Ukrainian Orchestra.

He said he knows there are a lot of opinions about what's happening in Ukraine but "I wish Americans could have stood in my shoes in that airport and heard those stories. ... Everyone in that orchestra had lost someone or had someone missing.

"It was a humbling experience."

Five for Fighting, Barenaked Ladies and Del Amitri are scheduled to perform 7 p.m. Saturday, July 15, Wild Adventures Theme Park. More information: Visit wildadventures.com.