10 Great Songs You Didn’t Know OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder Wrote

In retrospect, OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder‘s sideline as a successful Top 40 songwriter seems fated. His father was a gospel songwriter in the Seventies with an encyclopedic knowledge of the hits. “He could tell you the top records on the chart at any given point in time for basically all the Eighties and all the Nineties,” Tedder told Wonderland Magazine. Tedder started playing piano at age three, picked up the guitar as a teenager, and penned his first song when he was 15.

“Melody is the single most important thing to any song, period,” he explained to NPR in 2010. “I don’t care what anybody says, it trumps everything. Not because that’s my opinion, but because I think it’s actually indisputable fact: The human brain retains melody easier than it retains words. It’s that simple.”

Tedder’s career as a writer for others has been successful enough that at times it threatens to overwhelm his gig as frontman of One Republic – in 2007, the same year the band broke out with “Apologize,” Tedder penned a massive hit for Leona Lewis. Here are some of the highlights from Tedder’s extensive catalog.