OneRepublic Counts Stars Under the Fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl

There are some OneRepublic songs that almost seem designed for a place like the Hollywood Bowl.

“Good Life” wants thousands of people singing back its chorus. “Counting Stars” needs room to build. “If I Lose Myself” already sounds like it should end with something exploding overhead.

On Sept. 11, OneRepublic got all of that.

The first of the band’s two Fireworks Finale performances at the Hollywood Bowl stretched for roughly two hours and worked through nearly every version of OneRepublic that has existed since Dreaming Out Loud arrived almost two decades ago. The band moved from early songs like “Stop and Stare” and “Apologize” to Native-era staples, newer material from Artificial Paradise and recent single “Need Your Love,” before fireworks finally filled the sky over the Bowl.

The night started quickly.

After entrance music, “RUNAWAY” opened the live portion of the set before “Feel Again,” “Good Life” and “Stop and Stare” established just how much recognizable material the band could pull from without immediately reaching for its biggest songs. “Good Life” even folded elements of M83’s “Midnight City” into the arrangement, a small change that kept a song released more than 15 years ago from feeling locked to its original recording.

That became a pattern throughout the show. OneRepublic did not treat its catalog like something that needed to be reproduced exactly. “Run,” “Singapore,” “Secrets,” “Rescue Me” and “Love Runs Out” kept the first stretch moving while the arrangements regularly grew beyond their studio versions.

It also helped that Ryan Tedder is an unusually restless frontman.

One moment he was leading a conventional pop-rock set, and the next the concert was turning into a brief overview of songs most of the audience knew even if they did not immediately associate them with OneRepublic.

The acoustic section began with “Life in Color” before Tedder moved into Beyoncé’s “Halo” and a shortened “Bleeding Love,” the latter made famous by Leona Lewis. Those covers were not random additions. Tedder co-wrote both songs, part of a songwriting career that has existed alongside OneRepublic for years. “Bleeding Love” was written with Jesse McCartney, while “Halo” was co-written with Evan “Kidd” Bogart.

At another concert, pausing a band’s own catalog to play two enormous pop hits could feel like an unnecessary detour.

Here, it explained something about OneRepublic.

The band’s sound has always existed unusually close to the center of mainstream pop without completely becoming a conventional pop act. Tedder’s career as a songwriter and producer has blurred that boundary further, and hearing “Halo” between OneRepublic songs made those connections unusually obvious.

The Hollywood Bowl also gave the middle of the concert something most stops cannot easily reproduce.

A youth orchestra joined for “Entr’Acte” and “West Coast,” then provided a string introduction to “Apologize.” The latter was particularly effective. “Apologize” is already tied closely to the beginning of OneRepublic’s career, but giving its opening to live strings briefly stripped away some of the familiarity before Tedder’s voice brought the song back into focus. The young musicians later returned for the outro of “Waking Up.”

By then, the show had covered a surprising amount of ground without yet reaching “Counting Stars.”

There was also new music to fit into that history. “Need Your Love,” released in April after OneRepublic’s move into a new global recordings partnership with BMG, landed naturally among the older songs. Produced by Tedder and released after being tested during earlier live performances, it is one of several new tracks the band has put out in 2026. Their newest single, “Pay That Toll,” arrived Aug. 28, only two weeks before the Hollywood Bowl dates, although it did not make Friday’s set.

That absence actually reflected the larger priorities of the night.

This was not a concert built around convincing an audience to pay attention to a new era. It was built around showing how much OneRepublic already has to work with.

“I Lived” gave the later part of the show one of its biggest communal moments before “I Ain’t Worried” brought the whistle melody from Top Gun: Maverick into a setting where it has become one of the band’s most immediate live songs. “Sunshine” followed, and guitarist Zach Filkins was given his own spotlight with the instrumental “Zach Flamenco.”

Then the concert finally reached the run it had been holding back.

“Counting Stars” did not need much decoration. Released on Native in 2013, it remains the kind of song where the opening notes do most of the work; the crowd recognizes what is coming before Tedder has to ask anything from them.

But this was the Hollywood Bowl’s Fireworks Finale, so restraint was never going to last.

“I Don’t Wanna Wait,” OneRepublic’s collaboration with David Guetta, triggered the first major fireworks over the Bowl before “If I Lose Myself” pushed the production even further. Gold erupted above the shell while smaller bursts of white and blue spread across the sky, turning a song already built around a huge final release into something that briefly felt even larger than the stage beneath it. The setlist confirms both songs were paired with the evening’s fireworks sequence.

It would have been easy for the fireworks to become the only thing anyone remembered.

Instead, they worked because the concert had spent nearly two hours earning the scale of that ending.

OneRepublic has accumulated enough hits that a show like this could simply function as a playlist played loudly in front of a crowd. The Hollywood Bowl performance was more interesting when it resisted that. The acoustic covers put Tedder’s songwriting career beside the band’s own. The orchestra changed songs audiences had heard hundreds of times. New material sat comfortably next to music from 2007.

And when it finally became time to do the obvious thing, OneRepublic did not fight it.

They played “Counting Stars.”

Then they lit up the sky.