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| Distancing himself from mainstream music |
OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder has written some of the biggest pop songs of the past few years, like Leona Lewis’ ‘Bleeding Love’, Timbaland’s ‘Apologize’ and Beyonce’s ‘Halo’. However, his rock band is less popular.
Their sophomore release, Waking Up, released 90,000 copies in the first month, much less than the artists he writes for. In this interview, he talks about the pressure he feels matching up to old hits, working with Cheryl Cole, and Leona Lewis’ ‘Happy’.
The album’s first single ‘All The Right Moves’ didn’t do very well on the charts, but Ryan Tedder seems to want to distance himself from the mainstream. He says, “It's kind of a self-deprecating anthem and it's about how we've felt as a band at certain times. When OneRepublic came out, because of the other writing and producing I'd done, and because Timbaland was associated with our first single, we got completely discarded by the critics. Even if OneRepublic made the coolest art record ever, we'd never be able to erase the memory of how we broke. This song's aimed at all the cool-ass bands that we'll never be.”
In his song 'Secrets', he sings ‘Don't care if the critics ever jump in line’, a reaction to the poor reviews his first album received. He says, “'All The Right Moves' and 'Secrets' were written back-to-back, which is why there's some continuity there. What affected me is that the first album was intensely personal for me. You know, 'Stop And Stare' was written from the point of total desperation – I was beyond broke, I kept getting eviction notices and I really felt like I was watching my life passing me by. But because I happened to put these feelings to catchy melodies, I got torn apart in the reviews. I was hurt by that, so I decided to have some fun on this second album and kind of throw it back a little.”
Tedder says that after ‘Apologize’, he was nervous about living up to expectations. He says, “At this point I don't, because I've proven now that I'm not a one-trick pony. There was an initial fear of ‘Oh s**t! How do I beat this?’ The answer is you don't. When you have a hit like 'Apologize', you treat it as an anomaly. I mean, I could have put it out a year before or a year later and it probably wouldn't have done the same thing. When a song transcends the way 'Apologize' did, it's like there's a cultural eclipse where everything lines up and works in your favour. You can't choreograph that. All you can do is write the best songs you know how and try to push the envelope a bit.” |
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