Songoftheday 1/27/23 - I can't stand to fly I'm not that naive, I'm just out to find the better part of me...
"Superman (It's Not Easy)" - Five For Fighting
from the album America Town (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #14 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 22
Today's song comes from Five For Fighting, the recording moniker for pop singer/songwriter John Ondrasik. John grew up in Los Angeles, and after college hung around the L.A. music scene, mostly with the trashy metal crowd, and had a band for awhile before going into a whole different direction after the rise of grunge music in the early 1990s. Adopting the name "Five For Fighting", a hockey penalty term, to make it easier for people to remember, Ondrasik was signed to EMI Records and released his debut album, the indie pop set Message For Albert in 1997. However right at time the label was folding in America, and it wasn't promoted and quietly faded away.
Eventually, Five For Fighting was picked up by the Aware imprint on Columbia Records, and Ondrasik was back in business. At the close of 2000, he released the single "Easy Tonight", which became a modest hit on Billboard magazine's older-skewing Adult Top-40 radio chart, peaking at #26 the following spring.
For the second single from his upcoming sophomore album America Town, John wrote, sang, and released "Superman (It's Not Easy)", produced by Gregg Wattenberg. For a song titled after the biggest hero in the comic universe, the lyrics are about being vulnerable, as he explains the pitfalls of being looked up to, with lines like "I can't stand to fly, I'm not that naive, men weren't meant to ride with clouds between their knees". The piano-driven background and Ondrasik's high-register vocals drive the nice guy dilemma home, and as soon of wave of this will come (led by Pat Monahan's Train) Five For Fighting, marketed like a band in the music video, found him/themselves with their first hit, which by chance had a boost at radio after 9/11 when they pushed songs with titles like this no matter what the subject matter was...
"Superman" became Five For Fighting's first top-40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100, reaching the top-20 at the very end of 2001. On the radio, the song hit #15 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, while it topped the Adult Top-40 format for three weeks, as well as took eight weeks at #2 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list, spending well over a year on each. The track also crossed over to the Adult Album Alternative (or "triple A") rock radio format, getting to #7, and even popped on to the Latin Pop Airplay list at #38. Internationally, the single reached the top ten in Australia (#2), New Zealand (#2), Belgium (#4 Flanders), and Ireland (#5), and made the top-40 in Italy (#11) and Norway (#12), just missing the mark in the United Kingdom at #48. The America Town album, released in September of 2000, peaked at #54 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "Superman (It's Not Easy)" was nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Vocal Performance, losing to U2's "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of".
After the success of "Superman", the record company re-released "Easy Tonight" to radio promotion and with a music video for VH1/MTV, and this time it rose to #18 on the Adult Top-40 radio chart in 2002, and peaked at #20 in New Zealand. Two more cuts from the set, "America Town", and "Something About You", were promoted as singles, but didn't get much attention. But Five For Fighting will be back to the series.
(7/10)
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and lastly for a Christmas concert in 2018...
On Monday I'll be back with a numerical soul group wanting to hit the floor.
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