John Ondrasik

John Ondrasik writes and performs as Five for Fighting. He wrote Superman and 100 Years.

This was his second time on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast inside a year. They sat down at City Winery in Atlanta, where he was playing that night with a string quartet, two thirds of the way through that tour. He had come straight off a plane, had already been to Ted's Montana Grill twice in two meals for the bison, and had got a haircut. Banyas had spent the drive down listening to 100 Years and walked in saying so.

He turned 60 this year, which puts him in the bridge of his own song. He was in the second verse when he wrote it. His first tour was opening for Vertical Horizon, who gave him his first look inside a tour bus, and their bass player from back then, Sean Hurley, plays with him now, which makes the August run with that band a reassembly of sorts. He does not get up trying to write a hit. He writes what means something to him, and says he has the freedom now to do what he wants instead of what he has to. The newer songs are not on the radio and he knows it. He says they are landing in ways his hits did not.

His father is 86, still runs the family business and gets up every day to go to work, which Ondrasik credits for how well he is doing and which is most of why he does not plan to retire. The project he wanted people to hear about is the Music Matters Challenge, which puts a music teacher into a school. Entrants upload a video about a teacher who mattered to them and sing some of Let Music Fill My World, which he wrote with kids in Chicago. It has already funded a full time teacher at a Chicago school for three years. The principal told him a bright light had come into the school.