It’s too bad that we don’t have do-overs in life, especially when something is still bothering us many years later. If OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder had a rewind button, the singer would no doubt use it to reconsider giving the track ‘XO’ he wrote to Beyonce.
“For me personally, it was ‘XO’ Beyonce,” revealed Tedder to SiriusXM about the song he regrets giving away rather than using for his own band. “‘XO’ and ‘Drunk in Love’ came out at the same time, right she did a dual release on that album, and that song was the hardest for me because it was one of the only times wherein producing the song I was producing it when I was in Australia on tour.”
The frontman continued, “To give you a frame of reference, it was the month that I wrote or co-wrote and produced ‘XO’ was the month that ‘Counting Stars’ came out. As I was doing the demo and finished it and sent it in, I was like listening back to it, and I was like, and no one’s heard my version, but I was like going, ‘We could put this out.’”
Ryan Tedder also added, sharing the differences between his own take and Beyonce’s, “There’s a version of it that’s very uniquely different from the version she put out. She changed quite a bit, and my version of it to this day, I’m like, ‘We should put that out like,’ and so that one, you know, you’re giving it to Beyonce, so what am I, you know I’m not an idiot. It doesn’t get better than that; if you’re going to lose a song, you’re going to lose to Beyonce, right? But ‘XO’ is one that I was like, ‘Ah man but my demo,’ I just like I have demoitis with that one.”
It’s Beyonce, so did he really lose? Don’t think so, but as the writer and having his version of the track quite different from Beyonce’s version, Ryan lives with the what-ifs about the idea of releasing the song with OneRepublic and seeing how it would do. What do you think?
