FIVE FOR FIGHTING WITH STRING QUARTET w/ Lace and Lee

Ondrasik likes to say he was, “a twenty-year overnight success” who faced the rejection and struggles not uncommon to aspiring singer-songwriters. Born and raised in Los Angeles, his mother was a piano teacher and father an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.  Growing up between the two worlds of music and science, he began piano lessons with his mother at only two years old on his way to a summa cum laude Applied Mathematics degree at UCLA.

After mastering the keys (the first album he bought, by the way, was Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”), Ondrasik’s focus turned to songwriting and playing guitar. “At 15, my sister received a guitar for her birthday, which I quickly commandeered as I was beginning to realize the true purpose of musicianship was girls, girls, girls, and the piano was tough to haul around,” he quips.

Ondrasik’s love for music grew concurrently as he did.  The musician, who considers Freddie Mercury and Steve Perry among his vocal influences, studied opera and classical voice (because the rock stars did) and while he continued to make music, ever the realist, he earned that math degree should he need a stable profession to fall back on. All the while working at the family business Precision Wire Products. Precision Wire, he proclaims, “makes the best shopping carts in the world!”