By JAYDEE LOK
alltherage@thestar.com.my

BETWEEN trying to burn each other with a lighter backstage, Ryan Tedder and Zach Filkins, vocalist and lead guitarist of OneRepublic, spoke to R.AGE about what makes good popular music, and all the big-name artistes super-producer Tedder has worked with.
OneRepublic were in Malaysia as part of their Native Tour, and we caught up with them just a couple of hours before they took to the stage at Sunway Lagoon, Selangor.

R.AGE: What sort of questions do you hate being asked?
Ryan Tedder: It’s been, I don’t know, six years? And till today, we still have people asking: “Is it really too late to apologise?” or “When is it too late to apologise?”; and they think they’re being clever.

When they ask us something about that, it’s like the equivalent of us walking up to them with a yearbook photo from their sophomore year and being like, “what were you thinking?” That drives us crazy.

R: You’ve worked with so many big names in the music industry. Who would you like to work with next?

RT: U2, Peter Gabriel, Trent Reznor and Paul McCartney. I think in the next year, with some luck, I can cross at least two off that list. I can’t say who, though.

R: So who wouldn’t you work with?

Zach Filkins: I don’t think Ryan would work with anyone who is completely closed off to the idea of anything new at all.

The thing is, if you’re an artiste and you’re working with someone from the outside, in a sense, you are automatically saying “we are open to something new”. We are open to something that maybe we haven’t come up with.

But there are certain artistes whose label says that, but they in their hearts are not completely open to that and then there’s no way of getting anywhere.

RT: I have no desire to work with artistes if I don’t think I can contribute something. Like Jack Johnson is very successful but it makes no sense for me to work with him. He is not looking to evolve his sound. The same goes for Jason Mraz.

I’m not looking for a paycheck so I’m not interested in doing something just to keep the wheels on something that’s already moving. I want to steer it in a new direction. I get excited by artistes who maybe had a moment in the sun and they’ve kinda fallen off and I take it as a personal challenge to bring them back into the sun.

R: What’s the key factor in being successful in the popular music industry?

ZF: A big mistake that many musicians make is thinking that mastering an instrument will turn them into professionals. The focus needs to be on song-writing and what it takes to create a song that other people would like to listen to.

There are so many musicians that are 100% better at their instruments than we are, but they’re in their rooms, and they’re convincing themselves that “as long as I get better at this instrument, then by definition, I will be a professional musician”. The difficult reality is that that’s not true.

Being 100% better at an instrument or having a degree at that instrument does not mean you’re going to make it in the popular world because a lot of popular music is way simpler than that.

RT: A lot of musicians don’t understand that you live and die by the song at all times.
I don’t care how many covers you get, how many blogs you end up in, how many hipsters you know, how many parties you get invited to – if you don’t have the songs, then you don’t have juice, and you don’t have the career. You might have a moment, but if you’re always relying on everyone else to write your songs, that moment will last as long as you keep those friendships up.

The people who write the best songs win. That’s what our focus is on. We’re not trying to write records – we’re trying to write songs that have that magical thing. If you feel the magic, then millions of other people will feel the magic too.