Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2009-10-06


Interview:
We had the pleasure of hanging out with Eddie Fisher, Drew Brown, and Zach Filkins from OneRepublic on their tour bus last week. We chatted with the guys about the new album, the success of 'Apologize', and where they the music industry is headed. Check it out below.

What's the journey been like since 'Apologize' came out?

Drew Brown- It's been pretty nuts. We've seen between twenty and twenty seven countries that we hadn't seen before. It's been really rad. We've been really super fortunate to be able to cover almost every territory that has been into our band. It all kind of happened everywhere at the same rate it did here so it was really exciting. It's crazy because we toured for a solid year and a half. Then we actually got to have our first break for a while in forever. So now we're kind of back with a different perspective than I think we had going into it.

Tell me a little bit about the new album compared to the old album? What's the musical evolution for you guys?

Eddie Fisher: I think it's more percussive. It has more strings, gang vocals; it has everyone singing on it. Drew and Zach are doing a lot of different things; glockenspiel, viola, hand claps, and whistles. Drew is singing a lot of background vocals.

Zach Filkins: We felt like we had to take a different approach to making this record. We sort of looked at how the first one went over. I think the best thing that we got out of the success of 'Dreaming Out Loud' was a little bit of license to trust our fans to like good music. All the songs that we put out were really different. It was really liberating making the second record knowing that we hadn't set a specific formula or sound that we had to fit into. So when we approached making the new one, it was like we wanted to make good songs with as few rules as possible. I think that was really cool. It was also just the natural evolution of writing an album and then writing the next album five years later. There's five dudes in this band that probably thought of a million different things they wanted to say since we made the other one five years ago.

I read that 'Apologize' is actually the number 50 song on the Billboard's Hot 100 of all time songs from 1958 to 2008. What does that mean to you guys? Does it create any fear for your future work?

Zach Filkins: I don't think it is fear. First of all I think it's a huge honor to have a song that does that well. You can never expect that sort of success, and you can never plan for it. You kind of just go with it while it's happening. I think we all knew that 'Apologize' had something to it. We really didn't expect it to be that big. It's just a testament to our fans and to the support that we have, which we're really thankful for. I don't really think we have a fear about that. We let that song be what it is. We've moved on and I think we're extremely excited about the new album and the new songs. You can't go about writing songs by saying ok we had a chart topping song, we need to beat that. You just go at it by saying let's make the best songs we can at this time. I hope that we build more loyal fans.