Music Notes

Connection

My fifth choice is the 2018 OneRepublic song Connection, released ostensibly as a lead-up to an album cycle but ultimately never making the cut due to Covid. Crafted in a funky, hyper-modern style, with synthesizers and trappy beats, this song is cram-packed with rapid-fire words, though it only lasts two and a half minutes.

When Connection came out, the lyrics immediately clicked for me; I knew exactly what Ryan Tedder was trying to get across, in large part because I had recently read an interview   of his where he explained his desire to write more socially aware songs.

I sat down that same evening and wrote up what we call on Genius a "song bio," basically an article giving meaning and background and citing primary sources, which is then posted to the song's page. It was one of my longest annotations, and I was proud enough of it to pin it on top of my profile, where it sits to this day. Rather than copy pasting, I'll link to it here.  

The music video for Connection shows Ryan exploring a vast shopping mall, where crowds of grayscale people run around, mindlessly staring at their empty hands as though they're holding phones. A dancer stands in their midst, performing an intricate choreography, yet no one stops to bat an eyelash. This suits the song's theme perfectly.

The funny thing about the music video is, I assumed the idea of portraying people fixated on their phone-less hands was original to OneRepublic. It was only a couple years later I learned about Eric Pickersgill   and his photography series Removed, which features the exact same concept. Released and much discussed in the media in 2015, it became the obvious inspiration for OneRepublic's music video theme.

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