Music Notes

Dreaming Out Loud (deep cut)

Track #2 is a bonus track off of OneRepublic's debut album, released in 2007: Dreaming Out Loud. The song has the same name as the album.

This is another one of Ryan's cryptic, mysterious songs where he discusses his career hopes and dreams in language cloaked in metaphor. It struck a deep chord with me; so deep, in fact, that I have literally dreamed about hearing it a few times over the years.

Once in autumn of 2017, I saw this beautiful notebook cover at a Hamrick's store in South Carolina, and it immediately meshed with the song, which I'd only just learned. It became one of my earliest digital collage artworks, where I experimented with applying text and interesting patterns to images.

(When I uploaded the image here, I tried doing a Google Lens on it, expecting to be able to credit the original artist, but I couldn't find it. Thank you to whoever drew this.)

I always wondered why the title song was not a single released from the album, but merely a bonus track, only included in certain markets. Last year I discovered something when Switchfoot released the 20th Anniversary edition of their album The Beautiful Letdown. To celebrate the influence the original had on downstream artists, Switchfoot invited numerous of them to come alongside and sing their favorite track with the band.

Ryan Tedder chose the song Dare You to Move, waxing eloquent about how much it meant to him as a young songwriter just starting out in life. I had never heard of it, being from an era before my musical "coming of age." So I downloaded the collaboration and listened (it's the kind of song that sounds much better with high quality audio equipment.)

The hook tickled my awareness… hadn't I heard that melody before? Then, yes! Syllable for syllable, beat for beat, the chorus of OneRepublic's Dreaming Out Loud follows the identical melodic path of Switchfoot's Dare You to Move.

I dare you to move, dare you to move,
Dare you to lift yourself up off the floor

Vs

I'm dreaming out loud, dreaming out loud,
And all at once so familiar it seems

Good grief. No wonder OneRepublic never released Dreaming Out Loud as a single! I smiled at Ryan's youthful inspiration and didn't count it any less of him to do something so quaint.

If anything, it’s rather fascinating, because Dreaming Out Loud always made me think of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice tries to remember popular nursery rhymes but they come out with different words. This phenomenon really does happen when one dreams; I have experienced it myself.

Word count: 442.