Video | Why Hong Kong is a city to remember for American band OneRepublic
As pop rockers prepare to return on final leg of their world tour, singer-songwriter Ryan Tedder reflects on band’s early days, collaborations with Paul McCartney and U2 and his to-do list for Hong Kong stopover
After forming in 2002 in Colorado, the band rose to fame on the social media platform MySpace before signing with Columbia Records and releasing the breakout hit Apologize in 2006. Although cash-poor, living in such close quarters meant they could make music together every day.
This formative, creatively fertile period inspired one of the band’s latest songs, Rich Love, an ode to the simplicity and brotherhood of OneRepublic in their pre-fame days. “We didn’t even need money. We had Rich Love, that’s what it was,” frontman Ryan Tedder says wistfully.
The chorus line, “We’re broke as a bottle of wine”, was rattling around Tedder’s head last December, but the song finally took shape in February this year. It began life as a guitar ballad, until Tedder sent it off to Seeb, the Norwegian EDM production trio responsible for remixing Mike Posner’s I Took a Pill in Ibiza, to inject a little more oomph.
The result is a tropical house banger that wouldn’t feel out of place on a junk boat party soundtrack. It’s a departure from the anthemic, emotionally heavy songs that characterised the band early in their career, but Tedder was pleased to find that Rich Love and No Vacancy, another “fun, plucky, vibey” new track, fit snugly in their live set. “By the final chorus, everybody is singing,” he adds.
How Spanish song Despacito topped the charts with the help of Justin Bieber in a politically divided United States
As a band, OneRepublic have enjoyed enduring success, but it is Tedder’s songwriting career that has been stratospheric. The son of Gary Tedder, a 1970s gospel songwriter, he began playing piano when he was three and wrote his first song aged 15. The triple Grammy-winning 38-year-old is credited with some of the bestselling hits of the past decade, including Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love, Beyoncé’s Halo and Adele’s Rumour Has It, earning him the title of “the underground king of pop” by Billboard magazine.