Profile: Successful songwriter Ryan Tedder carved niche with band (original) (raw)

For the past decade, Ryan Tedder has lived a double life in music.

Ryan "Alias" Tedder, a successful songwriter and producer, has turned out hits such as Leona Lewis' Bleeding Love (2007) and Happy (2009), Beyonce Knowles' Halo (2009) and Jordin Sparks' Battlefield (2009).

He is also moving into the country realm through an upcoming collaboration with Rascal Flatts.

Meanwhile, Tedder is known as the frontman for the pop-rock band OneRepublic -- which he co-founded in 2002 in Colorado.

It has had one massive hit, Apologize (2007), and a pair of albums: Dreaming Out Loud (2007) and Waking Up (2009).

He stays busy, the 30-year-old Tedder said from a OneRepublic tour stop in Washington.

Most of the time, though, he finds that his two career paths complement each other.

"All the stuff I do with other people carves out territory that OneRepublic isn't going to go into," Tedder said.

"So, hopefully, with . . . (the band's) stuff, we can go our own way and see what we can get away with."

Tedder began making his own noise as a youth. He was only 3, living in Tulsa, Okla., when his parents enrolled him in Suzuki piano lessons and kept him practicing by rewarding him with candy corn.

"I grew up listening to Sinatra and Hall & Oates and the Beatles and the Beach Boys," said Tedder, who taught himself to sing and performed in church and in high-school musicals.

The roots of OneRepublic were planted in 1996, when Tedder left Tulsa to spend his senior year at Colorado Springs Christian School, where he befriended band mate Zach Filkins.

He continued playing music at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa and subsequently found a record-company internship in Nashville, Tenn. There, he produced demos and also signed his first publishing deal as a songwriter.

Country music wasn't necessarily his genre of choice, but his time in Nashville did allow him to study it closely and learn lessons he would apply to his music.

Tedder experienced a few bumps, however, along the road to his career: In 2001, he won a contest and a contract with 'N Sync member Lance Bass' Free Lance Entertainment that was supposed to result in an album release but didn't. And the first OneRepublic record deal similarly flopped.

During that time, Tedder became a protege of Timbaland. The virtuoso producer had him work with a variety of artists and included a remix of the OneRepublic song Apologize on his album Shock Value (2007).

With Bleeding Love, his reputation as a hit maker was cemented.