Ryan Tedder

Beyonce’s ‘Renaissance’ Album Is Said To Be Heavy On Both Country And Dance Tunes

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Classifying Beyonce’s massive discography of music into any specific genre is a mostly fruitless exercise (which didn’t stop us from trying in 2020) because the versatile star is constantly evolving and experimenting, refusing to be kept to just one box or genre. That musical dabbling will apparently continue on her upcoming new album Renaissance; Variety reports that the album will see Beyonce leaning more heavily into the country direction she flashed on her last full-length album Lemonade in 2016, as well as incorporating more “dance” music — although that’s a broad category which could figure in a lot of musical directions.

A source familiar with the album says that Bey has tapped Ryan Tedder, whose past contributions to her oeuvre included the angelic “Halo,” and neo-soul demigod Raphael Saadiq, who deserves far more credit for both his production work and his own extensive catalog. Since the surprise announcement for the album labeled the collection due on July 29 “Act 1,” that could be an indication that the album will either be released in parts or will be a “multi-disc” affair, in which case the songs could be organized by similar sounds.

In British Vogue‘s cover story about the album, editor-in-chief Edward Enninful describes being “transported back to the clubs of my youth,” which suggests a possible house, ball culture-inspired sound — which would be timely, since drag is enormous right now, with all kinds of artists tapping the sound of the underground subculture. It’s also big on television thanks to competition shows like Legendary on HBO Max. In any case, this is all just speculation until the album actually drops, but one thing is for sure: The Beyhive will be going crazy ’til then and Beyonce remains one of the biggest stars on the planet.

Ryan Tedder Reminisces About Writing Beyonce’s ‘Halo’ In Just Three Hours

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Beyonce has a handful of No. 1 singles to her name, but what is perhaps her biggest song isn’t actually one of them: “Halo,” which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2009, recently became Beyonce’s first song to eclipse a billion streams on Spotify. One of the song’s co-writers is OneRepublic leader and songwriter extraordinaire Ryan Tedder, who guested on The Tonight Show yesterday. While there, he spoke about how he and co-writer E. Kidd Bogart were able to pen “Halo” in just three hours.

Tedder told Jimmy Fallon:

“I had a three-hour gap in the middle of the day. My wife was gone, I called a friend [Bogart], and I said, ‘Hey, get over here, Beyonce wants me to write a song, let’s do it together.’ He had written a big No. 1 for Rihanna [‘SOS’]. I turned the keyboard on and — I wish every session went like this, but they don’t — the first sound that happened to play on the keyboard was the opening sound of the song. It sounded like angels and I was like, ‘Why don’t we do a song about angels, like her guardian angel, like Jay-Z is her guardian angel?’ Two minutes later, it evolved into, ‘Ooh, ‘Halo,’ that’s such a cool title, let’s go with ‘Halo.” Three hours later, the song was done, and then like 12 months later, the song came out, and it was that simple.”

Meanwhile, OneRepublic performed “Someday” on the show, so check that out below.