- 2021-08-28
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ OneRepublic Releases New Album “Human”: Streaming
American pop rock band OneRepublic released their fifth studio album “Human” for the first time in five years on August 27, 2021.
The album has been in the works for quite some time, with the first single “Rescue Me” dropping back in 2019.
The band finished probably 75 percent of the album before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Frontman Ryan Tedder recalled, “The rest of the songs, three or four new ones, were all finished over the last five, six months. And I tried intentionally to steer as far away from COVID as possible.”
The band returned to their music roots on the new album, which comprises of 12-track (Deluxe version 16-track).
“We wanted to make something where it's like, all right, if you've been with us at all going back to '07, '08, if you've liked anything we've done, this kind of encapsulates that,” he told Apple Music. “It's a summary of all four previous albums.”- Ryan Tedder explained some of the tracks for the album.
“Run”
“This song is about all the negative press. Everything that is on the news sucks ass 99 percent of the time: '“The world is gonna end, the economy is gonna crash, the sky is falling, everything is so bad…” and my reaction to that is – horse-blinders. Run. Go straight through it, cut through all the noise and B.S. Go do what you want, where you want, when you, how you want. Don't listen to anybody else. Have fun while you're doing it because if you're chasing stuff that is not fun, it is not sustainable. Do what makes you happy, tell everybody else to shut up. Turn the news off, get off socials, whatever is making you upset or depressed. All that nonsense is just going to slow you down. Life is short, live it while you're alive. We're not promised another day.”
“Didn't I”
“I had this idea that when you marry somebody or you choose to be with them, it's because you've had a lot of beautiful moments and somewhere the discord gets in,” OneRepublic's frontman explained. “But then once you have the distance, and it does break up, and you do go through that divorce, you still have those moments. You look back and you go, you know what? This ended in a disaster, but weren't we amazing, when we were amazing?”
“Rescue Me”
“'Rescue Me' was written very quickly, 10 minutes or less almost a stream of consciousness. It was me telling Brent, our bass player and cellist, “I wanna write a song with a concept I had started a few years ago (called “Rescue Me”).” He started playing this lonely sounding guitar riff and the first thing out of my mouth was the chorus as it is now.”
“Forgot About You”
“This is a rare instance where I was really irritated with somebody, another person in the music industry, who was threatening to sue me over the absolute most inane, outrageously ridiculous claim on Earth. I said, 'Man, I forgot he existed until this email.' I've never actually written a kiss-off record, just like literally, 'Bye.' And that's what it is. It is what it sounds like.” -
“Somebody to Love”
“This song we collaborated on; we found it from a middle school basketball coach in California who co-wrote this and we finished it with him. Now we're proud to put it out and I'm obsessed with this. It's called 'Somebody to Love', I hope you like it.”
“Take Care of You”
“I love the melody. I love the lyric so much. I just liked the idea of 'I take care of you, you take care of me.' And especially during the pandemic—I wrote this in the peak of the pandemic last summer. And it just felt like a very, I don't know, topical song.”
“Better Days”
“This was written at the beginning of the pandemic. We had the chorus almost finished, I went to Europe and when I got back the whole world changed overnight. I was just so distraught that I was like, 'Guys, let's write this, finish this song now, record it, and post it on Instagram,' which I never do. Then the CEO of Fiat Chrysler and a ton of diffrent car companies hits me up, saying they want to use 'Better Days' for their entire spring campaign. Then NBC calls, then NFL, ESPN. The next few months it was just the theme that all these companies were using for COVID, which is weird. This whole album was written for the most part in a pandemic, but that's the only song that actually addresses it and you can tell that we were in the middle of it.”
“Wild Life”
“Very, very OneRepublic, like an old-school OneRepublic song. I got hit by a bunch of songwriters that were OneRepublic fans growing up, and when 'Wild Life' came out they're like, 'Man, this is my favorite type of song that you guys do better than anybody,' because it's very much intrinsic to our sound, not a radio single, not a single, but just a beautiful record that I love.”
“Ships + Tides”
“This was the oldest song that was written on tour while we were touring on [2013's] Native, believe it or not. We started that song in Switzerland. I remember where we were. And we tinkered around with it for years, could never figure out how to finish it, and then we finally did. We wanted this beautiful serenity and orchestral movement. And in the past we've done those types of things on albums a lot. We wanted to go out on something extremely musical and kind of cinematic.” - source : Apple Music
