On OneRepublic’s Creativity

When the television show “Smash” needed to cast an innovative songwriter and producer who could re-envision the character of Marilyn Monroe with a harder edge, they called Ryan Tedder, lead singer and frontman for OneRepublic to play himself.

The long list of cross-genre artists that Tedder has either wrote songs for or produced is both inspiring and mind-blowing at the same time. Ironically, two of the names on that list are Carrie Underwood and Ellie Goulding, the chanteuses who were the other finalists for the fan-voted 2014 Billboard Music Milestone Award.

One could therefore ascribe the sheer innovative nature of OneRepublic’s three album discography solely to Tedder’s brilliance. One would be very wrong.

Take the bassist Brent Kutzle, for example. He also happens to play the cello, an instrument one does not usually hear in a rock song. Yet, on tracks like “All Fall Down” from their album “Dreaming Out Loud”, “Secrets” from “Waking Up” and “Preacher” from “Native”, his cello transforms and elevates each song into an ethereal experience.

Before they took the stage at the Billboard Music Awards at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, I chatted with the band on the red carpet, trying to ascertain the silver bullet of their creativity. Tedder explained, “The primary rule of this band has been from an early stage is that we don’t have any rules.” In other words, he explained, unlike many other bands, “we just don’t stick to one sound.”

Through the course of the short interview, the one word Tedder repeated more than anything else was the pronoun “we”, an inclusionary mantra that is evident in both their music and in the writing credits. “We’ve been lucky because we’ve been able to constantly evolve into whatever gets us off.”

Luckily for OneRepublic’s millions of fans, the constant aural evolution does not disappoint.