OneRepublic were a band. They still are a band, I suppose, but I think their peak of relevancy was around 2009-2014. Good Life was the first song I bought on iTunes. They were my first concert. Apparently they’re a lot of people’s first concerts. Interpret that how you may.
The problem is, OneRepublic are cursed. They are too musically conservative to garner any praise yet too musically adept to receive any ire. And so, they are irrelevant. They are the eye of the pop music hurricane. They may have been my first concert but I could not begin to name a member of the band beyond Ryan Tedder, the front man.
I attended the concert (April 24, 2015) with what was essentially a chaperone, which is sad, but in all honesty, I did not begin to genuinely think for myself until 2018. To be fair, she wasn’t a chaperone, she was a part of this program that would assign autistic kids such as myself a “Big Sister” or “Big Brother”. I know the program had noble intentions but in hindsight it all seems slighlty orwellian.
Anyway, OneRepublic were good, I suppose. When they sang Good Life they changed the line “Colorado” to “Toronto”, which I appreciated.
(I want to try an make an effort to sound somewhat upbeat on this blog. I promise I’m generally a pretty optimistic person.)
I think that concert was a good exercise for me. I love concerts now. COVID kinda put the breaks on concerts – the 2020 OK Go concert I bought tickets for has been postponed indefinaly, with the singer Damian catching and subsequently recovering from COVID during the interim – but I saw Coldplay live last time they were in Toronto and it was killer. They’re at their strongest live.
Anyway, I do still have fond memories of OneRepublic, even if the tour shirt I bought there was a size too small. After that concert, I learned that, indeed, I can handle live events, and have been to some plays, a festival, and Dan and Phil’s first live show (that’s a story in itself). I’m stockpiling a list of bands I want to see in the After Times.
Video: Ryan Tedder injecting the chorus of "Stay With Me" into the end of their song "Apologize". I took this with my iPod.
.png)