"Actually, I don’t know if OneRepublic is Christian rock for sure but it sounds like it. I peeped this video for their new single “Counting Stars” and got my first look at lead singer Ryan Tedder. Dude is cutesy! Despite possessing every element of “douchey straight guy”(fedora, artfully distressed clothes, awful overproduced music about apologizing), watching him dance about got me interested in what’s in his pants. There is such a thing as “hot douchebag”. Scratch that, it sounds gross."
Ryan Benjamin Tedder (born June 26, 1979) is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, multi-instrumentalist, and occasional actor. He is best known as the frontman of the pop rock band OneRepublic, though he has an independent career as songwriter and producer for various artists such as Adele, Beyoncé, Maroon 5, Demi Lovato, Ellie Goulding, B.o.B, Kelly Clarkson, K'naan, Carrie Underwood, Jordin Sparks, Leona Lewis, Gavin DeGraw, Sebastian Ingrosso, Gym Class Heroes, One Direction, James Blunt, Far East Movement, and Paul Oakenfold.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tedder was raised by an extended family of missionaries and pastors in a Christian church. He began learning to play the piano at the age of three via the Suzuki method. His early interest in music was prompted by his musician father and school-teacher mother, who coaxed their young son into practicing piano in exchange for candy corn. Tedder started singing at the age of seven. A self-taught vocalist, Tedder began honing this skill at the age of twelve by imitating his favorite artists, who ranged from The Beatles to acts as diverse as Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder and Sting. He has commented, "I sang for two hours a day every day of my life until I was eighteen." He continued to perform musically during his adolescence through church, school, and personally formed groups.
In his senior year, he moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met and became friends with future OneRepublic band-mate Zach Filkins on their soccer team at the Colorado Springs Christian School. He attended Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and began to showcase his own material there. Tedder completed his college education and graduated from ORU in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Relations and Advertising.
At the age of twenty-one, Tedder competed in a singer-songwriter competition and was selected by 'N Sync singer Lance Bass as one of five finalists to perform on a one-hour special on MTV, performing original material in front of millions of viewers. The prize for the winner was a music contract with Bass's now-defunct management company, Free Lance Entertainment. The contestants performed live and were then rated by judges and the audience; the highest scoring artist winning the contract. Tedder's performance of one of his songs, "The Look", received the most votes from the judges and fans, and he won the competition; however, a contract with a recording label was not finalized and no album was released. Tedder later revealed the record and publishing deal he was offered "wasn't real. It was just a bunch of hype that didn't turn into anything."
As well as producing, Tedder also sings lead vocals and plays guitar and piano for the band, OneRepublic. The five member band consisting of Tedder, Filkins, Eddie Fisher, Drew Brown, and Brent Kutzle was formed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2002 by Tedder and his high school classmate Zach Filkins. Tedder has since revealed that the band was formed at a "crossroads" in his life: "I was offered two publishing deals within two months of being in Nashville…I could have just written songs and lived a carefree life, but I knew that I had to be an artist. I wanted to form a rock band and create my own sound." Based in Los Angeles, OneRepublic started out as an unsigned act on the social networking website, MySpace. Since June 2004, they have accumulated over fifty million plays for their music on the site. As of 2009, they are the number-one band on MySpace and have been in the MySpace Music's Top Artists since the summer of 2006.
The band gained further exposure when their 2007 single, "Apologize", was re-mixed and re-released on Timbaland's compilation album, Timbaland Presents Shock Value. The remix became an international chart hit in the fall of 2007. The song broke records after gaining 10,331 spins in one week. According to SoundScan, "Apologize" is the most legally downloaded song in US digital history with sales of over 4.3 million digital downloads in the US alone. It is also the second best-selling song of the decade. OneRepublic's debut album, Dreaming Out Loud, includes both the song's original version and version with Timbaland, and was released on November 20, 2007 on Timbaland's Mosley Music Group imprint via Interscope Records. The band had previously been signed to Columbia Records, and their album was due to be released in 2006, but this did not occur. Tedder explained, "Crap happened. People got fired. Labels merged and politics abounded". Subsequently, the band was released from their deal with Columbia, and they were signed by Timbaland in the summer of 2006 becoming the first rock band to be signed to Mosley Music Group. Tedder has commented on the success of his band's hit single, "Apologize": "The toughest thing to do is write a hit song, but we had a hit song before we had an album… What has happened has been really strange and really great."
Tedder is a multi-instrumentalist. During OneRepublic's performances, he often switches from singing lead vocals to playing guitar, bass guitar, glockenspiel, tambourine, or piano. On rare occasions, he plays drums alongside the band's main percussionist, Eddie Fisher.
The band finished recording their second album, titled Waking Up on August 25, 2009, and released their lead single, "All the Right Moves" to radio and iTunes everywhere except Germany and Austria, where "Secrets" was released instead. The album was released on November 17, 2009 in the United States. To date, the second US single, "Secrets" has reached over 2 million digital downloads, and third single "Good Life" broke into the Top 10 on iTunes and radio everywhere.
In January 2012, the band was working on their third studio album, titled Native. The album was released on March 26, 2013 to mostly positive reviews from music critics. It became the band's highest charting album to date, as well as their first top 10 album, debuting at no. 4 on the Billboard 200. It sold 60,000 copies within its first week. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of "Feel Again", a single from the album, will be donated to Save the Children's Every Beat Matters campaign to support training front line health workers around the world.
Tedder is married to his girlfriend of five years Genevieve. He openly acknowledged and thanked his wife, Genevieve, in the liner notes of OneRepublic's debut album Dreaming Out Loud. Tedder and Genevieve have a son, Copeland Cruz Tedder, born on August 2, 2010 in Denver, Colorado. Tedder's second cousins, Adam, Ashley and Austin Clark comprise the band Sons of Sylvia and were formerly in The Clark Family Experience. He co-wrote their song "Love Left to Lose". Despite being a Christian, he does not want to be labeled as a "Christian artist". He has on one arm a tattoo written in old Japanese which he got while he was in Osaka, meaning "God's will" and literally means "God gives and God takes".
Tedder became involved with Southern Hospitality, a restaurant co-created in 2007 by Justin Timberlake at Second Avenue in Manhattan, when it opened a second location in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. On August 22, 2011, it was announced that Tedder had become the first franchisee of the Southern Hospitality BBQ brand and that there were plans to bring the concept in ten cities across the United States including Denver, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Phoenix, Palo Alto and Washington, D.C. They opened a restaurant in the St. Elmo Hotel in October 2012.
On May 29, 2013, Tedder performed at Healing in the Heartland: Relief Benefit Concert and a list of performers Miranda Lambert Reba McEntire; Vince Gill; Luke Bryan; Joe Don Rooney; Blake Shelton and NBC have put together the "Healing in the Heartland: Relief Benefit Concert" on Wednesday May 29, 2013 that will include some of Oklahoma's superstar talent to raise money for the victims of the tornado of May 20, 2013.
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