Five For Fighting prepares new album 'Slice'

Five For Fighting

Credit: Columbia

Flatten out your hand and hoist it to about eye-level. Shake it in the slightest and extend it away from your body.

That's what Five For Fighting's new single "Chances" is like: it starts out big, high, and stays that way, punctuated with master softie John Ondrasik's typical heart-string plucking piano line and that same, yelping voice that won over your moms and top 40 radio with "Superman (It's Not Easy)" in 2001, post-911.

This is the first offering from triple-F from the forthcoming "Slice," the group's follow-up to 2006's "Two Lights." That effort made it to No. 8 on The Billboard 200 album chart. The new one's due Oct. 13 via Columbia.

"Chances" is about... well, it's tough to tell between the writing cliches, but I'm pretty sure it's about love and "possibilites... over me." What? It's got all the trappings of a hit, with a strings section, a piano break down and a drum part that was apparently mixed entirely separate from the rest of the track. It's wussy enough to be in an action-romance, and hard enough to be called rock. Yet that voice... tells us nothing.

Listen for yourself, what do you think?