In a recent blog entry on his band’s MySpace Page, OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder talked about his long journey in the music industry to becoming the front man of a multi-platinum selling band. Tedder says his obssession with music started at a very young age, but it wasn’t until his junior year in college when he decided that he wanted to persue his dream, he just didn’t know how to do it. “I figured I’d get as close as possible to where music was actually recorded and created, said Tedder. “So I would call the complaint hotline phone #’s on the websites of record labels, when the ‘complaint department’ would answer I would say ‘I’m sorry, I must have been mis-connected to you, I was being connected to the human resources department.” Tedder says his tactic worked perfectly, as he would be connected to the label’s HR department where he would offer to work for free as an intern. Even then he says the label wasn’t always receptive to his offer. “I called London, LA, New York and Nashville [with no luck],” said Tedder. “Eventually Dreamworks (Universal music) hired me (for free) to come work in their Nashville publishing department.” Tedder said his job was to file all the songs written by the labels songwriters, which required Tedder to listen to over 30 different songs every day. After working for nearly 2 months, Tedder finally got his big break. “Meanwhile I was writing songs in my spare time, after 2 months there my boss asked me why I was ‘really’ there,” explained Tedder. “I told her, and she listened to 3 of my songs. She immediately offered me a publishing deal.” Tedder was then entered into a songwriting competition to be held on MTV in New York. Tedder competed against hundreds of other song writers and eventually won the competition and a record deal. But just when Tedder thought things were finally coming together they took a turn for the worse. “I went from that exciting moment to absolutely ‘nothing’ 9 months later. The deal fell thru, and I ended up back in Nashville broke and starting from scratch. Over the next 3 years I wrote my ass off with every writer I could and ended up in various production deals with Timbaland (who had seen me on that MTV show).” Following his work with Timbaland, Tedder and his newly formed band OneRepublic signed a deal with Columbia Records. The band would go on to record their debut album but would never see it released due to being dropped from Columbia in early 2006. “After getting dropped we became the #1 unsigned act on MySpace…Which is to this day THE reason we are still together,” said Tedder. The MySpace buzz got every label after us.” Eventually Polydor would sign the band, and finally after years of dreaming of success, Tedder would get the overdue recognition he deserved. Now touring in support of OneRepublic’s second release Waking Up, which has spawned the hits “All The Right Moves” and the band’s upcoming new single “Secrets”.