SONG OF THE DAY

“Easy Tonight” by Five For Fight­ing (Amer­ica Town, Aware/ Colum­bia Records, 2000). Writ­ten by John Ondrasik.

MY TAKE

This song was fea­tured ear­lier on this blog in the playlist titled “What Didn’t Make the Cut #5: Dri­ving Songs CD”.

I have loved this song for a decade, though the whole album is deserv­ing of praise (hence I am tag­ging this blog post­ing as a “note­wor­thy album”). I am actu­ally still mostly into this sin­gle song though… it slays me in the cho­rus every damn time!

Win­dows down, high­way at dusk, scream that cho­rus! Feel the song first and fore­most. And then read the incred­i­ble bio of the man who cre­ated this song below—I had no idea about ANY of this until research­ing this blog post. What an incred­i­ble record of phil­an­thropy! We should be so lucky to have some­one like him on this earth as a celebrity.

BRIEF BIO (a la wikipedia)

- The song “Easy Tonight” appears in an episode of the sitcom Scrubs.

- Five for Fight­ing is the stage name of Amer­i­can singer-songwriter John Ondrasik.

- His 2000 album Amer­ica Town went Plat­inum in the US largely because of the suc­cess of the song “Super­man (It’s Not Easy)”.

- The 2004 album The Bat­tle for Every­thing was also cer­ti­fied Plat­inum, mainly due to the hit sin­gle “100 Years” and the con­sis­tent sales of the album.

- Ondrasik has also released a DualD­isc of his 2004 album which has one side con­tain­ing The Bat­tle for Every­thing in its entirety with the other side being a DVD con­tain­ing bonus footage and Five For Fight­ing music videos.

- Five for Fighting’s fourth album, Two Lights, was released on August 1, 2006, and earned Ondrasik his first career Top 10 album, debut­ing at #8 on the Bill­board 200 albums chart.

- Five for Fighting’s fifth album, Slice, was released on Octo­ber 13, 2009, and the first sin­gle off the album, called “Chances”, was released for down­load on July 21, 2009.

- John Ondrasik was born on Jan­u­ary 7, 1965, in Los Ange­les, a child of a musi­cal fam­ily. — While he also learned to sing opera briefly, he quickly decided that he would like to be a singer/songwriter.

- Ondrasik went to col­lege at UCLA and grad­u­ated with a degree in applied sci­ence and math­e­mat­ics con­tin­u­ing to pur­sue music in his spare time.

- He adopted the name “Five for Fight­ing,” which is an expres­sion in ice hockey when a player receives a five-minute penalty for fighting.

- Ondrasik’s first album, Mes­sage for Albert, was released by EMI in 1997. Capi­tol Records re-released this album after the suc­cess of Amer­ica Town.

- In 2000, Five For Fight­ing signed with Colum­bia Records and released Amer­ica Town on Sep­tem­ber 26, 2000. The album made lit­tle impact, but “Super­man (It’s Not Easy)” became an anthem after the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks. Ondrasik would per­form the song at The Con­cert for New York City in late 2001.

- While Amer­ica Town failed to make the top 50 of the Bill­board 200 album charts, its con­sis­tent sales even­tu­ally led to its going platinum.

- John Ondrasik writes and co-writes music for other artists’ CDs. Those artists include The Back­street Boys and Josh Groban. He also writes and co-writes for movie sound­tracks, such as August Rush, We Were Soldiers, Chicken Little, Everyone’s Hero, Jimmy Neutron.

– Acad­emy Award-winning com­poser Stephen Schwartz, who penned the songs for musi­cals such as Wicked, Godspell and Pip­pin, co-wrote the title track to his fifth stu­dio album, titled Slice, as well as the track “Above The Timberline.”

- In the spring of 2007, Ondrasik cre­ated the first video char­ity website. The web­site allows fans to upload videos answer­ing the cen­tral ques­tion, “What Kind of World do You Want?” (taken from his hit song, “World”). The char­i­ties the site raises money for include Augie’s Quest, Autism Speaks, Fisher House Foun­da­tion, Save the Chil­dren, and Oper­a­tion Home­front.

- In Novem­ber 2007, Ondrasik coor­di­nated the release of 13 free songs for US mil­i­tary mem­bers called CD for the Troops. Ondrasik worked with AAFES to deliver more than 200,000 CDs to US troops around the globe and to offer the music from the CD as free MP3 down­loads. - In Novem­ber 2008, Ondrasik released another free CD for US mil­i­tary mem­bers. CD for the Troops II has 14 free songs and was released on Thanks­giv­ing Day. 200,000 CDs were pressed for the release and again made avail­able online at www.aafes.com.

- In Novem­ber 2009, a third install­ment of the “For the Troops” com­pi­la­tions was released. The tracks donated for “Stand Up for the Troops” are all con­tri­bu­tions from come­di­ans save for Ondrasik’s.

- He also per­forms on the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon and has done var­i­ous events for the Mus­cu­lar Dys­tro­phy Asso­ci­a­tion and Augie’s Quest, rais­ing aware­ness and funds for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).

- In 2008, he got involved in the musi­cal move­ment of spread­ing aware­ness about cur­rent slav­ery and human traf­fick­ing by per­form­ing a live ver­sion of “World” for the rock­u­men­tary, Call+Response.

- The singer’s ongo­ing sup­port of ser­vice­men and women, and his ded­i­ca­tion to his own wife and chil­dren, even led to him receiv­ing a spe­cial father­hood award from the National Father­hood Initiative’s 2009 Mil­i­tary Father­hood Award Ceremony.

VIDEO OF THE DAY