StʌrunneR

OneRepublic may just be the quintessential 21st-century pop group. The L.A.-via-Colorado band was one of the first artists to prove the power of social media—and also one of the first to launch a career off of a hit remix. Fronted by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Tedder, the quintet was ready to unveil its debut album, Dreaming Out Loud, in 2006, when Columbia Records unexpectedly dropped the band. But thanks to a major boost on Myspace, where it had been occupying the platform’s Top Artists list for nearly two years, OneRepublic gained another life. And the band would soon strike gold thanks to a key connection from the past—producer Timbaland, who discovered the young Tedder on an MTV talent show in 2000.

By the time Dreaming Out Loud finally dropped in 2007 (on Timbaland’s Interscope imprint, Mosley Music), OneRepublic had already flown up the charts with the producer’s beat-powered remix of “Apologize,” first featured on his album Shock Value. Timbaland’s version is more stripped-down than the original, which boasts luxurious strings and a sleeker climactic climb—key components of OneRepublic’s sound. Tedder, who was already a seasoned pop songwriter and producer for artists like Hilary Duff and Leona Lewis, is a natural melody weaver, letting his boyish croons soothe and soar through the band’s lush mix of piano, guitar, and strings. The group goes heaviest on sturdy rock anthems such as “Mercy” and “Stop and Stare,” but it pulls just as hard at the heartstrings when slowing down on poignant ballads like “Goodbye, Apathy” and “Come Home.”

Jam-packed with skyscraping hooks and rousing romantic pleas, Dreaming Out Loud is the sound of OneRepublic mastering pace, tone, and texture for maximum dramatic effect. Unsurprisingly, several tracks here made their way onto TV and film soundtracks as well as the charts. But the band had many more tricks up its sleeve—as was soon to be revealed.

Still riding high off the success of its smash 2007 debut, Dreaming Out Loud, OneRepublic released its playfully diverse 2009 follow-up. A lot had happened in the two years between albums. Most notably, the band scored two massive international hits with “Apologize” and “Stop and Stare,” but its members were already anxious to show off another side (or two). For the aptly titled Waking Up, the members break out of the melancholic dream state of their debut to let loose—and show a little attitude, too.

“Can you feel all the love like it was made for you?,” vocalist Ryan Tedder croons with a hint of snark on chamber-pop opener “Made for You,” which haunts with big beats and piano filigree before an angelic children’s choir pops up in the end. The track bleeds into “All the Right Moves,” the buoyant hit single that claps back at anyone claiming the band has “all the right friends in all the right places.” This defiance, heightened by a heavy rhythmic focus, fuels much of Waking Up—a significant difference from the sweeping balladry that dominates Dreaming Out Loud. You can hear it in percussionist Eddie Fisher’s hefty wallops on the fist-pumping “Marchin On,” in the plunky marimba on “Missing Persons 1 & 2,” and in Tedder’s vocals, which quicken to a rapper’s cadence on the funky groover “Everybody Loves Me” and the Bach-sampling anthem “Secrets,” in which he pokes a little fun at himself: “When a situation rises, just write it into an album,” he spits out. “Send it straight to gold, but I don’t really like my flow, no.”

While the band saves its most ambitious moves for the title track—part U2-level stadium rock, part gorgeous orchestral elegy—it stirs up just as much excitement with breezy sing-alongs like “Good Life,” whose unbridled optimism hints at OneRepublic’s next album, 2013’s shoot-for-the-stars juggernaut Native.

OneRepublic has never been shy about its ambitions nor its perfectionist tendencies. Before committing to the release of album number three, the band posted that “it has to literally be the best thing we’ve ever done.” Those are especially big words for a Grammy-nominated group with half a dozen hit singles under its belt and a frontman who co-wrote and co-produced Beyoncé’s “Halo,” Adele’s “Rumour Has It,” and many other pop-chart standouts. At this point, the trickiest thing for Ryan Tedder to juggle was the songs for others vs. the songs for his own band. But on 2013’s Native, his stratospheric vision for OneRepublic is abundantly clear: to be a source of entertainment and the pure celebration of life.

An extension of the band’s breezy 2009 hit “Good Life,” Native packages unbridled optimism in stratospheric pop-rock, impeccably polished with shimmering keyboards and topped with life-affirming gospel rave-ups. The big twist here is in the lyrics—many of which view life in the face of death. “I had a dream the other night about how we only get one life,” Tedder intones in a lullaby-like croon on “Something I Need,” before the song builds into a swelling, swaying sing-along: “If we only die once, I wanna die with you,” a choir pipes in. This romanticism pops up throughout the album. On the EDM-pumped “If I Lose Myself,” he repeats a similar mantra: “If I lose myself tonight, it’ll be by your side.”

Such grand statements come with even grander arrangements. The band deftly moves between churning alt-rock (“Light It Up”), skyscraping electro-soul (“Can’t Stop”), stomping folk-pop (“Counting Stars”), and a little bit of all of it for the triumphant “I Lived,” the ultimate anthem for living every day like it’s the last.

大胆混搭，充满奇想色彩的全新作品。

A decade previous, after OneRepublic broke out with the Timbaland-assisted power ballad “Apologize,” few may have guessed that the band could get so groovy, funky, and frisky. Even fewer may have predicted a Peter Gabriel collaboration. But anyone paying attention to the hitmakers’ trajectory could see that the Colorado pop-rockers certainly had it in them. With each successive album, OneRepublic was getting more comfortable breaking its own rules—as long as there was always a sticky hook behind the madness. Its fourth album brings together a wild mix of sounds, wraps it all in the band’s widescreen intensity, and lets it loose on the dance floor.

Similarly to its previous three albums, 2016’s Oh My My kicks off with a boisterous banger. “Let’s Hurt Tonight” builds dramatically around frontman Ryan Tedder’s voice, which somehow sounds bigger than ever as he sings about love equating to pain, one of several dichotomies that threads the album together. Another is the past and the future—the former encapsulated in nostalgic electro-pop on “Kids” and the latter in Coldplay-esque rapture on “Future Looks Good.”

But the central theme, man vs. machine, reveals itself most potently on the hip-shaking hit single “Wherever I Go”—“I feel alive when I’m close to the madness” may just be one of Tedder’s great lines—and in a few of the album’s surprise collaborations. Prog-rock icon Gabriel shows up on the propulsive synth-funk throwback “A.I.,” adding a deep sense of what may be either doom or delight: “It’s all too real,” he sings, “you make everything inside me feel.” Elsewhere, the band channels unfiltered euphoria with the help of French house duo Cassius on the thrilling robo-dance-punk title track.

Through it all, though, the human remains victorious, and OneRepublic has never sounded so tenderly romantic as it does alongside The xx’s Romy Madley Croft, who puts her dreamy six-string spell on the ethereal beauty “Fingertips.”

OneRepulic 想要通过《Human》这张专辑传达生而为人的种种感受——对于他人和生活的“爱”，内省过后产生的“恐惧”，以及由此而生的“希望”——主唱与创作核心 Ryan Tedder 用这样三个简单而隽永的关键词形容着新专辑《Human》的意涵。在首发单曲《Rescue Me》中，声声重复的“你会拯救我吗？”（Would you rescue me?）以及一系列反问句清晰昭示了主题。

在上张专辑《Oh My My》长达九个月的巡演征途后，OneRepulic 进入了漫长“假期”。为 Ed Sheeran、Camilia Cabello、Shawn Mendes、LANY 等众多歌手写歌的 Tedder，在乐队的积累期中同样陪伴了家人，并忙碌于为他人创作。要说这张专辑诞生的有些坎坷并不为过：为了品质更好，并且在专辑收尾前再多加一首歌，发片一直被推迟。但等到一切就绪，乐队也遭遇了疫情在全球肆虐，计划再次被搁浅。如今第五张专辑终于发行，它对乐迷和乐队成员无疑都有着一份特别的意义，一口气释放出这只乐队昔日汇聚的能量——Tedder 表示，借这张作品，乐队开启了全新的篇章。

尽管《Human》并未延续《Oh My My》极具实验色彩的风格，选择回归感性路线，但自上张专辑就开始出现的大量电子声响还是让《Human》变得“复古又新潮”。Dance-Pop 风格的《Run》的灵感正是来源于 Tedder 跑步的体会，轻盈的口哨声一路带领这首歌向前奔跑，歌词“也许有天天空会坍塌/也许有天我会一无所有/所以我会一直奔跑直到撞上那面墙”（They tell you that the sky might fall/They’ll say that you might lose it all/so I run until I hit that wall）中的不屈服，也让人想起他们的旧日名作《Counting Stars》。在普吉岛和曼谷创作的《Someday》前后制作了 30 个版本，乐队最终选择了清新民谣吉他主导的版本，并逐渐加入合成器与钢琴元素。这首歌仿佛象征未来某一天的明朗时刻，和另一首《Better Days》一起，为疫情生活影响下的乐迷带去希望讯息。

在流行摇滚的框架下兼容并蓄是 OneRepublic 音乐给人的感觉，这张专辑也不例外。《Distance》《Take Care of You》都使用了 EDM 元素，《Wanted》和《Ships + Tides》中保留了乐迷熟悉的弦乐和钢琴，营造出宏大氛围。OneRepublic 知道如何打动人心：在全球遭逢困顿的时刻，歌颂生命、精神、自由都显得弥足珍贵。身为人类的我们，在意识到生命脆弱之时，能够继续追逐什么，又为什么奔跑？或许可以在《Human》当中找找共鸣和答案。

After experimenting with their sound on 2016’s Oh My My, Ryan Tedder and his crew have returned to their roots in what Tedder calls their “most OneRepublic album” to date. “We wanted to make something where it’s like, all right, if you’ve been with us at all going back to ’07, ’08, if you’ve liked anything we’ve done, this kind of encapsulates that,” Tedder tells Apple Music. “It’s a summary of all four previous albums.” Songs like “Run” and “Didn’t I” evoke some of the band’s classic sounds as flourishes like whistles and orchestral strings are designed to remind you of some of their biggest hits.
Key to Tedder’s objective is writing pop songs that are relatable. ”I’m trying to strike a nerve, and at least somebody walks away with one or two records where they’re like, ‘Wow, that song just read my mail.’”
“For the people who’ve ever liked our sound, they’re going to find stuff on this album that’s going to connect with them sonically. And then I think we have to evolve.” Read more about how some of the key tracks on OneRepublic’s latest release came to be below.

Take Care of You
“I love the melody. I love the lyric so much. I just liked the idea of ‘I take care of you, you take care of me.’ And especially during the pandemic—I wrote this in the peak of the pandemic last summer. And it just felt like a very, I don’t know, topical song.”

Forgot About You
“This is a rare instance where I was really irritated with somebody, another person in the music industry, who was threatening to sue me over the absolute most inane, outrageously ridiculous claim on Earth. I said, ‘Man, I forgot he existed until this email.’ I’ve never actually written a kiss-off record, just like literally, ‘Bye.’ And that’s what it is. It is what it sounds like.”

Better Days
“This was written at the beginning of the pandemic. We had the chorus almost finished, I went to Europe and when I got back the whole world changed overnight. I was just so distraught that I was like, ‘Guys, let’s write this, finish this song now, record it, and post it on Instagram,’ which I never do. Then the CEO of Fiat Chrysler and a ton of diffrent car companies hits me up, saying they want to use ‘Better Days’ for their entire spring campaign. Then NBC calls, then NFL, ESPN. The next few months it was just the theme that all these companies were using for COVID, which is weird. This whole album was written for the most part in a pandemic, but that’s the only song that actually addresses it and you can tell that we were in the middle of it.”

Wild Life
“Very, very OneRepublic, like an old-school OneRepublic song. I got hit by a bunch of songwriters that were OneRepublic fans growing up, and when ‘Wild Life’ came out they’re like, ‘Man, this is my favorite type of song that you guys do better than anybody,’ because it’s very much intrinsic to our sound, not a radio single, not a single, but just a beautiful record that I love.”

Ships + Tides
“This was the oldest song that was written on tour while we were touring on [2013’s] Native, believe it or not. We started that song in Switzerland. I remember where we were. And we tinkered around with it for years, could never figure out how to finish it, and then we finally did. We wanted this beautiful serenity and orchestral movement. And in the past we’ve done those types of things on albums a lot. We wanted to go out on something extremely musical and kind of cinematic.”

2024 年全球最热的话题一定少不了“人工智能”，而 OneRepublic 携第六张录音室专辑《Artificial Paradise》更进一步：人造的天堂会是什么样子？不过从音乐角度看，这个问题倒是很容易回答：这支由金牌词曲作者 Ryan Tedder 领衔的美国流行乐队早已深谙成功之道，这一次，他们再次以蓬勃的情感与活力的动人旋律给人留下深刻印象。

我们可以在《I Ain’t Worried》中听到乐观的姿态，也可以找到与 Meduza 和 Leony 合作的《Fire》——如果你是一个足球迷，相信这首歌会是你的 2024 年回忆的组成部分。与此同时，David Guetta 这位久负盛名的 DJ 也为《I Don’t Wanna Wait》带来了优雅但热情的舞曲节拍，副歌旋律甚至让人不禁想起郭美美那首俏皮的《不怕不怕》。这张专辑听毕，至少我们可以清楚地知道 OneRepublic 的“人工乐园”听起来会是什么样子：无忧无虑、充满活力、甜甜蜜蜜。

One of the biggest hitmakers of the 21st century turns focus back to his day job.