Canter Bridge

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Five for Fighting’s John Ondrasik seems finally to have got over himself and down to the business of singing about life. The result is a splendid CD called, enigmatically, ‘The Battle for Everything.’ It promises to endure as a mile marker in his career, to say nothing of the annals of good listening.

The album’s opener, ‘NYC Weather Report’, fairly lilts. Ondrasik’s irony seems less bent on anger venting than on description of life as a stranger, one passing through with wistful memories of places and relationships that failed but somehow cast their expectation forward into destinations that await the end of this moment in the journey. Back, yet somehow forward, to New York City.

The man can also sing a mean love song. Shades of Sting’s lyricism haunt ‘If God Made You’:

Hey Kid .. Your time has come to change
Though I need you more than I’ve needed anyone in any way tonight
Hey Kid … I know it won’t be long
The Captain’s calling .. come to see you back where we belong
Something inside me is breaking
Something inside says there’s somewhere better than this …
Sunset sailing on April skies
Bloodshot fire coulds in her eyes
I can’t say what I might believe
But if God made you he’s in love with me

Ondrasik places the chord transition exactly where it releases the listener’s attentive energy. The man can score a song.

Then comes the high-air-play ‘100 Years’, a wistful survey of live’s brevity that conjures up Cat Stevens, John Mellencamp, and Billy Joel. Ondrasik stands up just fine in such company. It’s a tune made for hearing over and over again, then once more.

‘Dying’ underscores Ondrasik’s thickening credentials as a baladeer of lost love, though hardly with the campiness that such a description might suggest. It sounds real, not postured. Ondrasik has been criticized, of course, for the latter. This album should in part quiet that angle of criticism.

In my judgment, the balance of anger with deeper and more varied sentiments, together with Ondrasik’s growth as a writer, make The Battle for Everything his first five-star offering. One feels confident it will not be his last.