OneRepublic close chapter with ‘The Collection’ album.

Ryan Tedder is an American singer, songwriter and producer, and the lead vocalist with OneRepublic. This month sees the release of OneRepublic: The Collection, which spans their career from the breakout hit “Apologize” through perennial favourite “Counting Stars” to the critically acclaimed “I Ain’t Worried” from the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack. OneRepublic will head out on a European tour this autumn, starting in the UK.

Tedder has worked with some of the biggest names in pop and rock, such as Paul McCartney (co-writing and producing “Fuh You” for his 2018 album Egypt Station) and U2, on their albums Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. “There’s a couple of U2 songs I did that I'm particularly fond of. One is called ‘Every Breaking Wave’: I remember I was on the road with OneRepublic, I had a little Airstream studio following me, finally figured out that riff that's in the song, pieced it together and sent it to Bono.” He loved it, as did Brandon Flowers, who recruited Tedder to work on the Killers’ fifth album, Wonderful Wonderful, on the strength of it. “My whole career is a series of unintended consequences: you just never know who's listening.” Often, the song that catches someone’s attention is unexpected, he says. “Beyoncé, the first time she called me wasn't because of ‘Apologize’ – she knew the song, but she called me because of ‘Come Home’. She was obsessed with that song.”

The result of that collaboration was the Grammy Award-winning “Halo”, which topped charts around the world. Although it could be hard to see songs he’s written scoring such massive success for other artists, Tedder says he rarely loses sleep over it. “Some of the songs that I've done for other people we cover live, and while I enjoy singing them, I don't think they would have been a hit for OneRepublic, like Jonas Brothers’ ‘Sucker’. As much as I love ‘Halo’, I don't think me singing those lyrics lands the same way that it does with Beyoncé.” However, he does sometimes regret not keeping her 2013 hit “XO” for himself. “I love what Beyoncé did, but selfishly I liked my demo.” OneRepublic performed it in 2019 during their concerts with the Colorado Symphony. “It sounded crazy live. I wish I had kept that; I was a little jealous of that one.”

The transatlantic nature of Tedder’s collaborations has given him an insight into the differences between UK and US artists. “Whether it be from early in the days when I was working with James Morrison, who I still think is one of the greatest singers alive, and Natasha Bedingfield, Adele, to more recently Sienna Spiro, Ed Sheeran – I would say that lyrically the Brits tend to be more poetic. They'll push the boundaries on lyrics and song titles. Using Adele as the obvious example, when you have a phrase like ‘Chasing Pavements’, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ – what the hell does that mean?” For that reason, Tedder decided to pitch her a song idea with a similarly opaque title. “I was like, ‘This girl likes some wonky song titles.’ So I thought, well, I’m just going to do an alliteration and go for ‘Turning Tables’. I literally picked the phrase out of thin air. I just said, ‘How do you like the title Turning Tables?’ She thought about it. ‘Oh, that’s nice, I love that.’ I just took a shot in the dark.”

“I would say that lyrically the Brits tend to be more poetic. They’ll push the boundaries on lyrics and song titles. Using Adele as the obvious example, when you have a phrase like ‘Chasing Pavements’, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ – what the hell does that mean?”

— Tedder

Having spent nearly thirty years performing, producing and songwriting, Tedder also has plenty of experience with the less palatable aspects of a music career, the most recent being social media. “Unless you're already well established, no longer can you just do your art and be a great songwriter; you have to be a marketing genius. Everyone’s out-peacocking each other all the time. It's not why I got into music, or frankly why anyone I know got into music.” The second challenge, by contrast, is an age-old problem: “There's no shortage in this industry of really bad managers who have bad instincts and will take a world-class artist and steer them off the edge of a cliff, without even realizing they're doing it. Bad management is the absolute killer of great careers.”

The third necessary evil, says Tedder, is the amount of work you have to produce as a songwriter to even stay in the running. “It used to be, on any given Friday, there might be 30–40 new songs from major label artists that you had to deal with on iTunes. And now there's about 110,000–120,000 new songs on a Friday. It's a volume game as much as it's a quality game. And for people who aren’t mentally wired that way, it’s soul-destroying.” As a result, Tedder walked away from songwriting for eight or nine months in 2018, and at one point wondered if he’d ever return. “I just thought, ‘This is horrendous, I want nothing to do with this.’” Now Tedder manages prodigious levels of productivity by always moving forward. “Some years ago, I had to divorce myself emotionally from the songs once they're written. I'm very, very much emotionally engaged when they’re being created, but once they’re finished, I take the Woody Allen approach to creativity in filmmaking, which is at the end of every movie he wraps the movie, has a glass of wine, and then the next morning he wakes up and starts typing out the script for his next film.”

However, Tedder recently had to look back over his past work while compiling OneRepublic: The Collection, which brought the band’s relationship with UMG Interscope to a close after eighteen years. Although he’s keen to emphasize that they are still on good terms with the label, it rankles that the band don’t own any of the music they made during that time. “Those are my stories; all of the songs on the collection hold a lot of emotional meaning to me, because now kids from age five to their grandparents, I've seen around the world dancing to them, graduating to them, getting married to them, having funerals to them. But it's bittersweet because it's like you built the house but you have to pay rent to live in the house.” Tedder hadn’t envisaged making a greatest hits album – “you do that when you're done, so I've never wanted to do it because we're not done” – but it seemed like an ideal way of marking the end of a chapter. “Create something physical on vinyl and give the fans something unique that ties all of the dots together – this was the perfect way to do it.”

L-R: Brian Willett, Brent Kutzle, Ryan Tedder, Eddie Fisher, Zach Filkins, Drew Brown. Image: Press.

This summer, OneRepublic signed to BMG on terms that allow them to keep the copyright to their music from now on. “I’m more excited for new OneRepublic music than I have been in probably eight years,” says Tedder, who has just started work on their next album. “I already know what the sound is – I made a playlist about a month ago of all the songs that I was listening to that are inspiring me, and I shared it with the band. I more or less just said, ‘This is the world that I want it to live in’, and I’ve already started making those songs.”

Although his songwriting output is consistently high, averaging two songs a day when not on tour, he says that writing for his own band is much harder than the work he does for other artists – especially the lyrics. “I’m the harshest judge of myself, so I'll sit and listen and think, ‘Ahh fuck! I've already said that. I've already covered this topic.’ I asked Bono years ago, ‘How have you not run out of shit to say, man?’ He's like, ‘Well, love is the ultimate thing. It's the ultimate North Star for everyone. So I've basically spent decades re-approaching love from 100 angles.’” An added burden is that Tedder can feel like he's competing with himself. “I’m like, I can't be having hit records with this artist over here and this artist over here, and then deliver a fucking nothing-burger for OneRepublic. We have to have great songs that the whole world wants to sing. And so I definitely am putting a lot of pressure on myself this time around. But hey, maybe that's a good thing.”

OneRepublic: The Collection is out now.

The ‘Escape to Europe’ 2025 Tour kicks off in Dublin 18th September.

Author: Rachel Goodyear