Music Notes

Beautiful Colors, by OneRepublic

This is the first track in my blog series of seven songs for Jeff's 2025 edition of the Barrel of Monkeys challenge. We're required to choose songs related in some way to the number 25. I've chosen OneRepublic's Beautiful Colors because it was released this year, so fits the rules.

Beautiful Colors marks several milestones for OneRepublic as a band: their 20th anniversary, their first single released under a new label, an adjustment in their public image indicative of an upcoming album, and their third and final song released for an anime soundtrack.


What it Sounds Like

With a slow, emotional buildup, sweeping synths, Ryan Tedder's signature melisma, and a backing cello, Beautiful Colors has “all the feels” of a classic OneRepublic song. It particularly reminds me of tracks from their 2016 album, Oh My My, which I chose as my 2024 Musicology Anthology collection.

Ryan, lead singer and producer for his band, explained the professional decisions behind the song's production style in a Billboard interview prior to the release. He pretty much described exactly the kind of song I prefer to hear from 1R. This was good news, because I didn't care for the other two songs they made for the anime series, Nobody and Invincible. The production on those was too slick: modern, prepackaged pop. Even the acoustic version of Nobody doesn't click, because Ryan didn't bother rerecording more muted vocals over the admittedly pretty guitar line.

Beautiful Colors, however, is designed to be the “perfect” 1R song, the kind that gives you chills and vibes a certain way.


What It Means

Lyrically, it's a theme written to resonate with as many people as possible: “you're beautiful. I see you. Don't hide your light under a bushel.” It's a gentle affirmation of one's value in a world where people are measured by how many Instagram followers they have or how much hustle they can squeeze into the day. If one doesn't fit into the boxes, one tends to feel invisible. Especially these days with so much AI content going around, it's important to remember the true value of a human being.

The music video is rather ridiculous, in my opinion, and bears no connection to the lyrics. I will not be embedding it.


Personal Significance

I'm too mature these days, and Ryan is too much of a polished professional, for me to attribute a whole lot of personal meaning to the song. There was a time when I would have listened to Beautiful Colors with starry eyes and said “it's like he's talking to me!” and read my own story into his words.

As it is, I find it comforting to hear because it's a style I know and love. I was beginning to wonder if OneRepublic was going downhill stylistically, with formulaic, soulless sonic patterns produced mostly to make viral TikTok soundbites out of. After all, their tracks are definitely getting shorter and simpler. Beautiful Colors runs only two minutes and forty seconds, plus a mysterious fifteen seconds of silence at the end. Like most 1R songs lately, it has no bridge, lyrical or otherwise, nor even a hint of where one would be.

I'm happy with it because it shows me Ryan Tedder is well aware of what the fans enjoy and what kind of music best fits our perception of his band. Even if he's doing it more commercially and formulaic-ly, twenty years down the road from where he began, he still knows how to cut “all the right moves.”

Words: 585.