Songoftheday 10/03/24 -I'm fifteen for a moment caught in between ten and twenty, and I'm just dreamin' countin' the ways to where you are...

 

 

"100 Years" - Five For Fighting

from the album The Battle For Everything (2004)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 13

Today's song comes from Five For Fighting, the moniker for pop singer/songwriter John Ondrasik. Andrew's second album, and first on the Aware imprint of EMI Records, America Town, scored the artist his first hit with "Superman (It's Not Easy)", which reached the top-20 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 at the end of 2001. (Fun side note - it was nominated in the Pop Duo/Group category at the Grammys.)

In 2004, Ondrasik returned with his second album on the label, The Battle For Everything. The lead single from the set was "100 Years". Written by John and produced by Gregg Wattenberg, the song's lyrics play with numbers in relation to a human lifetime, with the critical puberty age of fifteen anchoring it. With milestones of young love, making a family, midlife crises, and coasting through the later years, the song seems to try to give promise to the youth on the vast amount of days ahead of them. The production from Wattenberg is movingly reverent in the way that Marc Cohn's debut was a decade before, with the piano dominating the backdrop but a seemingly orchestral tone comes behind it. Ondrasik's vocals are in the higher range but clear in the delivery, demanding you pay attention to his words. With a dramatic video that relies on character instead of effects (a rarity at that point in time), Five For Fighting scored a second big hit...

 

 "100 Years" became Five For Fighting's second top-40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 in May of 2004. On the radio, the song peaked at #40 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, and #12 on the Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple A") Rock format. But it's biggest success was on "easy listening" radio, topping the Adult Contemporary chart for twelve weeks and spending a week at #3 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 list. Internationally, the single reached #32 on both the Australian and New Zealand singles charts. The Battle For Everything album, released in February of that year, crested at #20 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies.

The second single from the album, "The Devil In The Wishing Well", made it to #23 on the Adult Top-40 chart. That was followed by rendering of the Christmas standard "Silent Night", which was on a special bonus disc sold with some copies of the album, which went all the way to #2 on the Adult Contemporary radio list. Lastly, in the spring of 2005, the single "If God Made You" climbed to #20 on the Adult Contemporary chart. 

Five for Fighting will be back to the series.

(7/10)

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Here's Ondrasik appearing on ESPN's Sports Center program...

And lastly, on a televised holiday concert at Brigham Young University in 2017...

Up tomorrow: Former child star takes a shower?