It began 15 or so years ago, when orchestras started asking to collaborate with John Ondrasik, the pop-rock singer-songwriter better known as Five For Fighting.
“It was so exhilarating for me to play these songs with a 32-piece orchestra behind my back, and it also allowed me to pull songs out of my catalog that I typically wouldn’t do,” he recalls.
With new arrangements from “some world-class composers,” Ondrasik added a whole new dimension to some of his best-known songs — “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” “The Riddle,” “100 Years” — that “kind of revitalized my joy of performing.”
“It was just so exciting for me,” he said during a late September phone call. “We wanted to take it to smaller venues, so we reduced the arrangement to string quartet, and have been kind of doing that for the last decade or so.”
Five For Fighting (aka John Ondrasik) is bringing his strings tour to Fox Tucson Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 21.
Five For Fighting With Strings comes to Fox Tucson Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 21, one of dozens of string shows he does every fall with an elite cast of Broadway musicians.
“They’re so fun because of course they can do all the classical, the Chopin, the Rachmaninoff,” he said. “But they love playing pop music. They love playing rock music. So for them, this is like the highlight of their year.”
As excited as the quartet is to be on a rock stage, that pales in comparison to Ondrasik’s kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness of being on stage with them.
“Sometimes I get lost just watching them, you know. I have to kind of catch myself and remember, ‘All right, you’re singing a song now’,” he said.
With the strings, Ondrasik said some of his songs take on deeper meaning.
“It just adds a certain emotion that only strings can do,” he said, mentioning his military family homage “Two Lights” as an example. “The strings are really the emotion. They’re the pain, they’re the reality. And it’s something that you can’t interpret from just a piano and a vocal or even a rock band. They’re the humanity in much of my music.”
Ondrasik tours with the string quartet in the spring and fall and devotes his summers to the piano-based soft rock that launched his career in the early 2000s and has brought him 10 Top 25 hits on Adult Contemporary charts including the No. 1 hits “Superman” in 2001 and “100 Years” in 2003.
Adding the string quartet to the mix, though, has been something of a reinvention and rejuvenation for the 60-year-old father of two, whose daughter, Olivia Ondrasik, tours with him. Olivia’s Lace & Lee folk duo with Caroline McPherson opens for Five For Fighting.
“They come out and bring the house down,” he said. “Just having her and Caroline with us ... they have the joy, the excitement, the nervousness, all the things that we used to have.”
At some point in Tuesday’s show, Ondrasik will leave the stage and turn it over to the quartet “and just let them basically kind of jam.”
“You never know what they’re going to play. It could be Mozart, it could be Led Zeppelin. I kind of give them the stage and I become a fan and that’s always one of the highlights of the show as well,” he said.
An emotional and personal highlight for Ondrasik comes when he plays his updated version of “Superman,” rewritten in honor of the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Ondrasik, a fiercely outspoken critic of the attack and advocate for the hostages’ release, was recently honored by the White Rose Society, an organization that recognizes non-Jews for their support of Israel.
Ondrasik said he has invited students from the University of Arizona Hillel Foundation to be at the concert.
“On many of our college campuses, they’ve been under siege with a lot of antisemitism, so whenever somebody comes to town, that gives them a big hug,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to that and spending time with the kids and having them come to the show. That’ll be a very kind of special part of visiting you guys.”
Tuesday’s show at the Fox, 17 W. Congress St., starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $24-$70 through foxtucson.com.
