Ryan Tedder Quotes

I grew up in the era of the concept album. What I do now is pick up on singles, and they are their own complete stories; you don't necessarily have to hear the rest of the album because I don't think albums are created like that anymore. They get songs from all over the place.

I've always dreamed of having an album. The problem is that it's just very difficult to make an album nowadays because through technology, music shifts so fast, especially electronic music. Once you make five songs, the first one you did is already old and you wished you would have put it out right away. So that's kind of the difficult part.

In this business, things go in waves, and I might make a record every three years. That's enough for me; that satisfies me. And it satisfies the so-called public, because they don't really need a record every year. They don't even want one.

I can do whatever I want now. I can drop seven songs in two weeks and fans don't care about whether it's from an album or not. They just care about the music.

I may just keep releasing singles 'til I run out of music, which is kind of cool in a way - as long as people don't go, 'Oh my God, not another one!'

Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.

Even at my biggest, I want to be writing for other artists. Even at my peak - the highest I can be as an artist - I always want to be keeping my creative juices flowing, keeping money in the bank, putting my intellectual property out there.

I don't believe in the philosophy of stumbling across hit records.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.

Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.

In 29 years, I had recorded over 2,200 songs. I was amazed.

I see people who work on their look and they work on their poster and their website and you know, the music will speak for itself no matter what. So if you put maybe like 95% of your energy on music and 5% on playing out and telling people about it. That's kind of a good equation.

I think the record industry has gotten to be more about labels wondering what the new single is rather than labels nurturing artists. It's gotten away from making a full album of music that someone would want to listen to all the way through.

I think it's a reflection of the music business in general, which to me seems very fragmented.

Everyone's talking about how no one is buying records any more, but to me it's quite logical. In the 1990s, music was so hardcore-marketed to a certain group of people that I think a lot of kids felt taken advantage of.

I hate the whole 'record your album, do your promo campaign, have a year off to write another album' pattern. As an artist, you should keep creating as much as you possibly can.

Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologize?'

It was actually 3 years between albums. That seems like a long time to me.

I think from an artist standpoint, you have to put out music that you feel like represents you and things you feel like your crowd wants to hear. And if that drives them to go and download the album or the single, that's what we want.

Most of the time I don't force records. I'm not one of these guys that put records out every nine, 10 months. I'm pretty long between records. I've only had a few in my career. I kind of wait until I feel I have really strong songs. I don't know if they're going to change the world or not, but I dig 'em, and if I dig 'em we make a record.

All I have to do to continue to make things work is make great records, and that's more important than having a crazy master plan.

My father would make record after record, and he'd be so surprised at what would sell and what wouldn't.

I make music almost, like, every day. But I don't release a lot of music.

The fans are always wanting new music, and with as much as I love to write, I might as well give them the music while I've got it.

It used to be OK to have two or three songs out a year - and those are your singles. Now, they don't want that. They're like, 'OK, I heard that. Next!'