Five for Fighting are recording the follow-up to their breakthrough second album, America Town, with plans for a fall release. Thanks to the post-9/11 success of the melancholy piano ballad "Superman (It's Not Easy)," John Ondrasik, the Los Angeles group's only official member, is getting the chance to make the big-budget record he's always dreamed about.

"I think it's a large sounding record in the tradition of some of my favorite records like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, Nevermind, Joshua Tree," he says. "I'm not saying we made my version of that, but that's kind of what I aspire to my whole career."

Ondrasik is teaming with a core group of musicians for the first time, including the album's producer Bill Bottrell (Sheryl Crow, Shelby Lynne) and guitarist Andrew Williams, formerly of the Williams Brothers. They are recording at Bottrell's studio in the Northern California coastal hamlet of Mendocino. "It's an old manufacturing warehouse on the bluffs," Ondrasik says. "As I'm singing my vocals I can look out the window and see the whales going by. It's the other end of the world. Even though it's not too far from L.A., it really feels that way."

Despite his panoramic surroundings, Ondrasik's goals remain modest: He hopes to remain successful enough to make a fourth album and shed the one-hit-wonder tag. "There is a six-year-old child inside of me that is a little annoyed that I didn't get the respect that I deserve from the last record," he says. "Just because you have a song that's successful doesn't mean that it's trivial and that your record's trivial."

New songs include "If God Made You," "Infidel," "Angels and Girlfriends," "Nobody" and "Disneyland." Many are informed by post-9/11 society, including some late efforts inspired by the war in Iraq, and even one poke at the French. "I think we're learning that the world we want to live in is not the world we live in," he says. "Maybe the world's just fucked up . . . It's impossible for that not to permeate some of my songs. I don't want to sit and write silly pop songs. There's enough people doing that."

NEAL WEISS
(April 15, 2003)