OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder on the secrets behind writing for everyone from Beyoncé to Paul McCartney
Not many songwriters would have the audacity to hang up the phone on Paul McCartney, let alone hang up on him more than once. It says a lot about Oklahoma-born Ryan Tedder – No1 hitmaker for everyone from Beyoncé to Ed Sheeran, and frontman of Grammy-winning pop band One Republic – that the former Beatle was so desperate to make a song with him that he rang Tedder a total of four times in a row.
It was for McCartney’s 2018 album Egypt Station, and Tedder was in Soho House Los Angeles, where there is a no-phones-allowed rule. “I knew he was going to be calling me in the next two weeks, but I didn’t realise, when this British number kept trying to call me, that it would be him.”
So Tedder sent him a text: “New number who dis”
McCartney replied: “P”
Tedder: “P who?”
McCartney: “Sir Paul.”
Tedder, who ended up working on two songs for the album – Fuh You and Get Enough – puts his face in his hands and groans. We’re talking at the start of 2020 on the Rosewood London’s rooftop suite just before the pandemic shut down the music industry, delaying his new OneRepublic album, Human, by almost two years. It’s the Grammy-winning band’s fifth album – their first since 2016 – and is full of catchy, toe-tapping, big-chorus pop that veers between the upbeat and melancholy.
It hasn't set the charts alight, but considering the audible notes of desperation in emerging pop songs straining to become a hit, it’s a relief to hear OneRepublic staying true to the sound that made their name. And with the band still tallying up 34 million streams a month, it’s an approach that seems to be working.
That doesn’t mean Tedder can’t write a No1 hit when he wants to. Ever since One Republic spent 48 weeks in the charts with their breakout No1 song Apologise in 2007 (topped by 77 weeks for their No1 song Counting Stars seven years later), Tedder has been pop’s go-to songwriter, writing Bleeding Love for Leona Lewis, Halo for Beyoncé, All I Ever Wanted for Kelly Clarkson, Happier for Ed Sheeran, Rumour Has It and Turning Tables for Adele, and I Know Places for Taylor Swift. He went on to win three Grammys for his work with Adele and Swift, on their albums 21, 25 and 1989 respectively.
Becoming “pop’s undercover king” as Billboard crowned him on their cover in 2014 was perhaps not the most obvious career path for the son of Christian missionaries in rural Oklahoma. But his father was also a musician, and taught Tedder the piano at the age of three with the help of candied corn, with which he would bribe his son for time sat at the keys. Tedder then began singing from the age of seven, practising for two hours a day until he was 18 by covering everyone from the Beatles and Peter Gabriel to Stevie Wonder and Sting. But he was particularly inspired by British rock, namely Jeff Buckley and Muddy Waters. He told Billboard: “To this day, the album I play the most is a Muddy Waters compilation. It's spiritual and uplifting but it's dirty at the same time. It's in the dirt, and that's what I want."
It wasn’t until 2003, when Tedder was 24 – having worked as a waiter at various pizza joints and weathering several knockbacks including a record deal falling through after he won an MTV competition – that he formed OneRepublic with his friend from high school Zach Filkins. Tedder provided the writing and vocals while Filkins played guitar, and they scouted out further three bandmates before blowing up on MySpace in 2004. When famed record producer Timbaland remixed the band’s first single Apologise from their debut album Dreaming Out Loud in 2007, it shot straight to No1 while the album debuted at No14 in America. Shortly after, Jennifer Lopez came knocking, asking Tedder to write her top 40 single Do It Well, while Leona Lewis went straight toNo1 after Tedder wrote her Bleeding Love. Stars began to form an orderly queue.
Tedder’s secret, he says, is the book of Dianne Warren songs he bought as a teen and which he studied as bible. And doing his research.
“If I'm going in a session with you, the first thing I'm doing is I'm getting on your IG and I'm backtracking the last six months of your life,” he says, but a little gossip helps too. “When I was writing Halo for Beyoncé, who approached me after hearing my [OneRepublic] song Come Home in 2007 and wanting something similar, I don’t think at that time she and Jay Z had been announced as a couple. But I knew that she loved him. I knew that that thing was a thing. And so much of songwriting is about good luck. And the first sound that my keyboard made when I turned it on was the sound of angels singing. And the song came from there.”
A little behind-the-scenes intel also proved helpful when Tedder was approached by Camila Cabello to write her breakup song Cry For Me in 2019, just after she had ended it with British life coach Matthew Hussey. For years, Tedder had a rule – no break up songs, because when artists inevitably get back together, they bin the song and Tedder loses time and money. “The number of amazing singles I’ve lost”, he chortles. “But Camila asked me to break the rule, and I said yes because I knew Shawn [Mendes] was crazy about her. He’d been gunning for her for two years. It was the big secret we all knew but couldn’t talk about. So I said to her, ‘Camila, you have to promise me you won’t get back with Matthew’.”
Luckily for Tedder, Cabello kept her word, and he hasn’t lost hope on his shelved singles – he is currently in the market for pop’s heartbroken souls. “I have two breakup bangers on my hard drive right now. I wrote one with Elsie, who writes for Miley [Cyrus], and we wrote a banger of a disco kiss off song, called Right Now, but we’re just waiting for the right artist to break up with someone. Someone’s gonna do it soon. Ladies, call me!”
Also in the bank is a song Beyoncé rejected, Marathon, after a writing session in which Tedder gave her the hit XO. “I still have Marathon if anybody wants it, it’s really good!” adds Tedder, who was unbothered by Queen Bey’s snub. “The thing about Yoncé is you don’t get instant feedback. I waited for three months before I heard on Halo. I found out that XO was going to be the lead single of her album the day before it went out. I was in the studio with Ella Henderson making Ghost and I got a call from Beyoncé's management asking me to clear the studio because Beyoncé was coming in, XO was going to be the single and I had to mix it right now before her surprise drop the next day. I had to make Ella and her team sit outside for 45 minutes.”
But Tedder has thick skin – songwriters must. For instance, collaborator Jason Mraz still hasn’t got back to him and it’s been almost 10 years. “He’s the only artist in history where we worked together and then literally never talked again,” he shrugs. “But every artist I know ices me. I'm just not the type of producer that sweats artists; I won’t text them asking why I didn’t get the single.”
Tedder can also afford to turn things down himself. When Bradley Cooper approached him to become lead songwriter for the Oscar-winning film A Star is Born starring Lady Gaga, Tedder passed. “I got asked repeatedly and I passed,” he says, a slightly tortured look passing across his face. “That definitely feels foolish now.”
Not as foolish, however, as the story he tells me on the way out of the Rosewood, reminiscing over his early days of fame. Tedder was rising up pop’s gleaming ranks, and as fans were flocking wherever he went, he required an alias to check into a hotel.
“My old fake name was either [former NBA players] Magic Johnson or Larry Bird. But then I had to change Larry Bird because he has more fans than I did and fans caused more problems thinking Larry Bird was staying in a hotel in San Diego than if I had used my real name.
“So I swapped my fake name to the name of a famous movie director. And it got me into even more trouble. Because I’m with my wife and it’s our anniversary, and we’re checking into this gorgeous hotel in Northern California, which we've never been to. We've talked about having never been. We check in and the concierge don’t recognise my face of course, but they see this movie director’s name, and they recognise that.
“And the concierge says, ‘Oh good to see you again Sir! Oh… is this your wife?’ And she looks at my wife like I was here with another woman. My wife turned to me and said, ‘So you have been here before.’ We went to the room, there's champagne, there are roses, and we sat there and we did not speak. This is our 10 year anniversary.” Tedder grimaces. “I’m telling you, the first three hours of our anniversary were the worst three hours of anybody's anniversary.”
Not the smoothest moment for pop’s undercover king, but it can’t be as bad as airing Paul McCartney and passing on A Star is Born. “Or blowing off Peter Gabriel,” he sighs, the door closing. A story for another day.
Human is out now