Accusations that we ran an actual kangaroo court on Mr Tedder can be directed to a brick wall, thanks.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Look at this list right here for a moment. “Bleeding Love,” “Battlefield,” “Halo” – all Ryan Tedder compositions, all performed by vocalists willing to go the extra mile and then another ten, all examples of positive and negative romantic excess. “Something I Need” has Tedder coming over all smitten and the mood simply doesn’t gel as well as his hired gun work. Perhaps optimism doesn’t work as well for his own material – that drama sapped out of his work, he falls on anaemic clumps of “hey”s to communicate comfort. (Hints of fearing mortality poke their head out but they are dismissed with a shrug and a dumb grin.)
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Anthony Easton: Rhetoric, and quite dull rhetoric, and rhetoric that prevents women from speaking, in favour of an obsessive and overblown kind of positive reinforcement that denies her autonomy. I cannot imagine anyone would be convinced by this.
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Patrick St. Michel: *Looks at the camera, raises an eyebrow* Well, I sure don’t need this. *winks, cue laugh track*
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Alfred Soto: “If you only die once I wanna die with you” presents ontological — not to mention physical — difficulties.
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Brad Shoup: A true Killers rip would be crammed with metaphors. One conceit and a fib about drinking doesn’t cut it. It could be worse, I guess. They could’ve picked up a banjo.
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Will Adams: The OneRepublic Monster spits out another watery lump filled with predigested pop tropes — Benny Blanco’s mechanical stomp; a multitracked-to-hell chorus; “ho!”s; “hey!”s. Their continued presence must be part of some insider deal to keep them on radio for at least ten years as long as they keep repurposing the same schlock. That may sound cynical, but there’s not much else to say when faced with a band whose sole feature is being as featureless as possible.
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Edward Okulicz: Tedder didn’t so much as write this song as paste it together from a bunch of unfinished drafts united by nothing more than rhetoric about death and drying. Fittingly, even at twice the bpm this would be a horrific dirge.
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Katherine St Asaph: Ryan Tedder jests. OneRepublic will never die, because OneRepublic is too big to die. It is how they justify their tenure and how they write their songs. “Something I Need” is grand as deadweight and earnest as a beggar, stretching to the heavens banalities disguised as profundities (we all drink too much, but most of us drop the Emerson act once sober) and codependency disguised as romance. (“You’re like the net under the ledge / I go flying off the edge, you go flying off as well.” Delightful!) So far, so standard, until the chorus. It too is mostly standard — sluggish processional, major-key ennui, wind machines rigged to sing backing vox, about two rousing embellishments above capacity — but the sentiment rings new. Either Tedder wrote a “you only live once” chorus in like 2008 and hastily redrafted after “The Motto” made YOLO a FAIL, leaving in the last lousy outro for his songwriter’s portfolio; or he wrote it in 2012 after YOLO made his Facebook wall, praying (in topline notation) that he’d be first to claim YODO. It is gobstoppingly cynical. It’s built to some inspirational purpose, though God knows what; maybe “Something I Need” will be repurposed as an ironic theme to some mumblecore flick, swelling as our sadsack hero lies catatonic facing away from his sullen off-again girlfriend, or perhaps as a musical stirring speech to goad filmic soldiers to their certain doom, like in The Pirates of Penzance. I cannot imagine a better use. Go, ye Tedder, go and die.
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W.B. Swygart: Because, when you think about it, matters of life and death really are quite boring, aren’t they? Still, this might be the first music video to semi-imply that people who wear Beats by Dre earphones are awful, so there’s that.
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