Ryan Tedder Talks To ‘Wonderland’ Magazine About OneRepublic’s Unusual Single “Wherever I Go”

Robbie Daw | May 4, 2016 9:30 am

Don’t expect OneRepublic‘s new single “Wherever I Go” to sound like anything they’ve done before — or, for that matter, anything else on the band’s upcoming fourth album.

“I think it’s gonna be shocking, kind of the first response anyone has is their eyes are kind of spread open like ‘Oh my god’,” Ryan Tedder tells Wonderland in a new interview. “It’s not indicative of the entire album but it’s kind of like if you go have dinner, you don’t order steak for an appetizer and steak for dinner, you split it up, and you have different things, so the first single is – it’s definitely an appetizer, I think it’s the best appetizer we could come up with.”

“Wherever I Go,” Tedder adds, is also the shortest song OneRepublic has ever recorded. (It’s under three minutes.) And you can expect some influences of Sigur Ros and Miike Snow in there: “I’ve been a long time fan of Miike Snow, so you’ll probably hear a little hint of that kind of melody, you know, it’s very different – the highest notes I’ve ever sang in my life are in this record.”

Equally perplexing to explain for the OneRepublic frontman is the forthcoming Joseph Kahn-directed video for the single, which Ryan says is “a bit of a mad kind of unicorn. It’s so bizarre.”

CREDIT: Hiroshi Clark / Wonderland

While discussing OneRepublic’s follow-up album to 2013’s Platinum-selling Native, which contained the smash hit “Counting Stars,” Tedder points out that the quintet wanted to make sure the music stood out from the rest of today’s Top 40 fodder.

“Everything – you could do an entire album on a laptop these days, and some of the biggest records are all electronic laptop driven, and there’s a lot of humanity, I think, missing in radio,” he explains. “And so we wanted to make sure that you could actually hear the human beings and the actual instruments that are in the actual songs, so that’s the last thing I’ll say. It’s new and very modern but there’s still a big dose of humanity in it because you can actually hear the players.”

So there you have it. There’s no release date yet for the album, but we’ll be anxiously awaiting OneRepublic’s very own Kid A.

See more photos of Ryan Tedder, plus his full Wonderland interview, here.

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