I have to admit, I thought I’d be a much bigger One Republic supporter than I turned out to be. From the moment they did their collaboration with Timbaland, I pretty much liked every release that they’ve put out, and then I discovered that the lead singer also wrote many hits for others, so they couldn’t really do no wrong, but for whatever reason I haven’t been able to really catch on to their most recent releases.
In December 2016, the band released the single “Let’s Hurt Tonight” in support of the Will Smith movie “Collateral Beauty”. When a video was dropped back then, I didn’t even watch it past the first few lines, but I’m having a much easier time getting into their own video for the song, uploaded this week.
The video isn’t much different from the first video, but they’ve just removed the movie scenes. However, they also have used a slightly different version of the song. This one starts out with a simple guitar intro, but it makes a world of difference, as it provides an immediate energy…. for a ballad. In other words, it’s not as boring as the movie video made it out to be.
The song has a really nice angle when it comes to the lyrics. To me, it makes sense that this would really work in a movie. In the build up of the first verse, I almost sense a bit of a gospel influence, but it’s only a vague reference and it quickly gets replaced by today’s pop sound.
In the chorus, the song gets really powerful in its music. This is also where the strongest lyrics are, as you might normally expect, but in today’s music it’s actually rare to find no repetition of phrases or words in the chorus, so I thought it was worth a mention.
Nevertheless, I have to admit that I still don’t think their recent material is as strong as their old material was, so I’m still not really back onboard with One Republic.
