Ryan Tedder Says OneRepublic Scaled Back Touring Schedule to Protect Mental Health and Family Lives (Exclusive)
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"Going forward, there's much more focus with all the band members on balancing being home," says the musician, who recently wrote a hook for the new Sprite Limelight campaign
Creating songs and giving them away is common for Ryan Tedder, but his works aren't usually released in different forms by multiple artists.
The OneRepublic frontman, 43, recently wrote a hook for the new Sprite Limelight campaign, which global artists Feid, Cassper Nyovest, Lexa and Lay Zhang have each turned into four unique songs that'll be released in the coming months.
Feid's track is the first to drop this week, and it arrives alongside a music video and "Heat Confessionals" clip of the Colombian singer offering a look into his behind-the-scenes process.
This year's campaign marks season two of Sprite Limelight, and the previous iteration featured a hook by James Blake that was crafted into songs by Coi Leray, Omah Lay and Hua Chenyu.
"Our aim with Sprite Limelight is to break the mold of the traditional music and brand partnership with a new type of platform that places artist stories and new music at the center of everything," said Joshua Burke, the Coca-Cola Company's global head of music and culture marketing, in a press statement.
He continued, "Our global Sprite brand platform is 'Heat Happens', and our program, propped up by Ryan's incredible hook, showcases how this roster of fearless artists stay 'cool' in the face of their own 'heat.' This is a message we all can relate to, while sharing an inspiring side to these artists that their fans may not have seen."
While basking in the success of OneRepublic's massive recent hit "I Ain't Worried" from Top Gun: Maverick, Tedder sat down with PEOPLE to discuss the band's lasting career, Sprite Limelight, fatherhood and more.
How did you sign onto this Sprite Limelight campaign?
I knew about the campaign because James Blake is a good friend and collaborator. He told me about it when he was doing it, so I was aware of it. The call, to be quite honest, came completely out of the blue, and like anything else in life, it's relationships and happenstance. One of my good friends, and the head of brand artist relationships and just everything at Interscope, who I've known for years, is really tight with [Joshua Burke] from Coca-Cola and Sprite, so that's pretty much how it came across my desk. We were on tour in Saudi Arabia when I got the offer, and I started the song a couple days later.
How did the songs come together?
The Feid one was the first one to be completed. They all genuinely ended up sounding how I hoped they would — none of them sound like they were written for a campaign. More or less, my whole instruction to anyone was, "Do not write this for a campaign. The chorus is already taking you there. Write a song you love." In theory, I've taken care of the campaign part, so if you're utilizing what I've done in any form or fashion, it's going to serve the purpose. [I told the artists to] basically treat me like you downloaded samples off the internet, and you're just using them. Make a record however you're going to make it.
It'll be cool to see how each one is received by the artist's fans.
I don't know if they knew this was going to happen, but all four of these artists are huge in their respective territories. Feid, since he signed on to do it, went from bubbling under [in the Latin genre] to second only to Bad Bunny in terms of male Latin artists globally. I think he has four or five songs inside the top 50 today, including one that's No. 8 in the world. It's unreal how explosive his career has been. I would've been banging down his door to work with him without any Sprite connective tissue at all. He was an artist I wanted to work with. I would say that his song is the most different from what the original demo was. He really took it into his universe. Hopefully, it reacts like any other Feid record would and his fans love it because it's him being 100% authentic to who he is. Again, that's hypercritical with every one of these songs.
Each one of these artists — and I've listened to a lot of their records — not one of them compromised for the sake of the campaign, if that makes sense, right? Again, they did exactly what I was hoping to do, which is they just used what I did as a sample pack, and just use it throughout the song where it made sense and whatever. In some cases, they use the chords and my chorus, in some cases they use the sample of my vocal, so each one is different and unique to them.
This campaign comes at a great time for an artist like Feid, but also for you, as OneRepublic just celebrated 3 billion streams on "I Ain't Worried" from Top Gun Maverick. How has it felt to see the life that song's had, especially since it's the band's first top-10 hit since 2013?
It's wild. Since 2014, when "Counting Stars," "Lose Myself" and "I Lived" came out, we took a break. I flamed out from exhaustion, and we took a pretty big freaking break on releasing material. Since then, we found our audience to be more global than we ever anticipated. Everything we'd put out would become a hit in Europe, Asia, and Australia. America was the hardest nut to crack. We'd go around the world, and do arenas and then come back to America and be like, "Why aren't they playing our music here? It's No. 1 in Switzerland. What's going on?" And it took Top Gun of all things, the most American movie of all time, to reignite the American fan base here.
It's harder to have hits now than ever, because you're competing with the entire history of recorded music. Never before in history would a song released present-day be competing against an 11-year-old Lady Gaga song, "Bloody Mary," or a Sia record from seven years ago, "Unstoppable." A song that I wrote three years ago with Miley Cyrus, "Angel Like You," has now gone viral. This is the weirdest time in music history, period. It used to be that you would do all the TV shows, interviews, a couple great live performances, and the song would work its way up Billboard because the song was great, and you didn't have to have the biggest movie in the world. Nowadays, you really need a cultural amplifier for a record to be heard.
For instance, Feid has created his own cultural driver and is riding a wave of success after success. Again, I credit Josh and the Sprite team for seeing that coming. These artists have enough fans and enough cultural significance for these songs to actually react in real-time.
You've had so many different waves throughout your career, and so much has changed since OneRepublic first debuted. Now, you're a husband to your wife, Genevieve, and father to two sons, Copeland and Miles. How's family life been lately?
Family life's been really good. We've done a lot of traveling together around the world. I took my family to Thailand and Southeast Asia for the first time, which was phenomenal. Last year, I call it the Chinese buffet syndrome of what artists went through. You show up to the Chinese buffet, and if you show up too hungry, if you haven't eaten for too long, you get there, your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and you make yourself sick from eating too much food. So, in 2022 and part of 2023, I think every artist that had been stuck at home for two-and-a-half years — us being one of them — the second COVID started lifting, and Live Nation and all the offers started coming in for tours, we just said yes to everything.
Then, we got halfway through 2022, and the whole band was like, "What are we doing? This is way too much. We can't do this again." It was awesome, but it affected our family life. Everyone in the band was stressed because we were having flashbacks to 2015 and 2016, which is what caused me to completely flame out. I could sense that wall coming again, so we've now put into practice, I would call it laws of touring, which is no more than in a calendar year, eight to 10 weeks. No matter if we have the biggest hit in the universe, if we're playing the hottest hand in the history of the band, eight to 10 weeks in a calendar year is the most that we will allow ourselves to be gone because of our families.
2022 was making up for lost time. That said, I don't ever want to repeat it again. We went around the world twice. I've already seen it, so I don't want to flame out. Going forward, there's much more focus with all the band members on balancing being home. You've got to really figure out some work-life balance when you have this job.
Do you see either or both of your sons ever following in your footsteps as musicians?
I think I would assign a greater than 50 percent chance given what both of my kids now do. They make fully-produced tracks. [Miles] is 8, [Copeland] is 12, and my 12-year-old is now fully versed in Ableton, making dance records, and so is my 8-year-old. [Copeland] plays guitar and piano, and he can play basically anything he hears on streaming, radio or otherwise. I wouldn't guarantee it, but I would say that the possibility is definitely high. Actually, [Copeland] is singing background vocals on "I Ain't Worried" in the chorus. That was his first record. He's credited as a background singer — still figuring out how to get him paid, but I think we'll take care of it.
I was forced to take on lessons for years and years and years, and I walked away from it because I hated it so much, and then I came back to it. So, I've intentionally not pushed it. They've gravitated toward it naturally. In my perfect world, they would start the 2030 version of Major Lazer, and they go on to collaborate with artists all over the world and have huge records. I think it'd be a fun life, and I could definitely give them some pointers.
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