Nothing about Five for Fighting is what you would expect, starting with the name. It comes from hockey, indicating a five-minute major penalty for fisticuffs, and it would be a perfect moniker for a hard-charging punk-rock band. Yet the group’s songs tend toward piano-driven, lump-in-the-throat ballads, such as “100 Years” and “The Riddle.” Moreover, Five for Fighting isn’t really a group so much as a pseudonym for singer-songwriter John Ondrasik. In concert, there aren’t even five musicians on stage. The quintet is a quartet: just Ondrasik and three others. Is the fifth guy in the penalty box?

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And one other thing: The title song on the latest Five for Fighting album, Two Lights, was inspired by a lunch with NRO columnist Victor Davis Hanson. In the history of rock music, surely this is some kind of first.

Even if it weren’t, though, Ondrasik would be a special talent — an entertainer uniquely suited to the post-9/11 world and one who isn’t afraid to speak his mind.

“A friend of mine was working with Victor and asked if I wanted to meet him,” says Ondrasik, aboard his tour bus before a show in Washington, D.C., last Friday. “I’d read a lot of his work and said I’d love to.” They met at a coffeehouse in Palo Alto and hit it off. Hanson invited Ondrasik to join him for lunch with one of Hanson’s former students, a Marine who was about to deploy to Iraq, and the young soldier’s father, a Vietnam veteran.

At lunch, Ondrasik sat by the dad. “I asked him how he was doing,” says Ondrasik. “He sat back, closed his eyes, and said, ‘It’s really hard on his mom.’ It was obviously hard on him, too. I saw the natural fear of a parent as well as pride in a son who is carrying on a tradition.”

From this encounter came the song “Two Lights.” It’s about a father whose son goes off to war:

One day he came to me, said
Freedom’s nothing to look over
Till each man can stand upon its shoulder

When the father hears that a member of his son’s unit has been killed, he goes for a nighttime drive and hopes that his boy isn’t dead. He asks his wife for a favor: If she hears that their son is alive, leave on two lights. Just before sunrise, as the man arrives home, he looks up at his house and says “my eyes burn.” What does it mean?

“I had to leave it open-ended, because sometimes the news is good and sometimes it’s bad,” says Ondrasik. “The song symbolizes the no-man’s-land that these families live in every day.”

Five for Fighting’s breakthrough came in 2001, with the single “Superman.” The song is about a hero wracked by self-doubt. It was a hit before 9-11, but it took on a new life in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Suddenly, Ondrasik found himself onstage at the Concert for New York, the benefit show organized by Paul McCartney and attended mainly by New York City cops and firefighters. “All of my influences were there, from McCartney to Pete Townsend to Billy Joel,” says Ondrasik. “Watching a 250-pound man in the crowd sing the words to your song with tears running down his face shows how much music can matter to people. Meeting the families of 9/11 — I still think about it everyday.”

It’s certainly on his mind when he writes tunes. Songs such as “NYC Weather Report” and “Johnny America” are best understood through the prism of 9/11. “That day made us aware that the world is not how we would like it to be,” says Ondrasik. “It’s not a liberal-conservative thing. It’s about having a world that’s safe for our kids.”

For Ondrasik, that means taking a clear-eyed look at America’s enemies. In “Freedom Never Cries,” which opened Friday night’s concert, Ondrasik sings:

I saw a man on the TV
In a mask with a gun
A man on the TV
He had a 10-year old son
I saw a man on the TV
His son had a gun
He says that he’s coming for me.

“The war trumps everything,” says Ondrasik. “We face a worldwide threat from Islamic terrorism. The obligation of the singer-songwriter is to say what he believes, and if we can’t have a conversation about the radical Islamic threat then we’re in trouble.”

Doesn’t this put him out of step with left-wingers in the music industry?