Tag: Ryan

Ryan Cabrera is turning back the clock to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his first album, Take It All Away — and he’s enlisted what he calls a team of “TRL all-star alums” to help him.

Entertainment Weekly has the exclusive premiere of the new version of the singer’s iconic 2000s pop song “On the Way Down,” re-recorded with NSYNC’s Joey Fatone, Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, Hanson’s Taylor Hanson, Drake Bell, Walk the Moon’s Nicholas Petricca, and Hot Chelle Rae’s Nash Overstreet. Listen to it below.

“I got to have a bunch of my friends whose music I love join me on a song that basically started my career,” Cabrera tells EW. “It’s weird because I still think TRL happened yesterday, but it’s super cool that I’m able to do a new spin on this song that meant so much to me.”

But Cabrera didn’t originally plan on assembling the Avengers of early-aughts pop for the milestone anniversary of his debut single, which peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 on the TRL chart. He wanted to revamp “On the Way Down” on his own, but he struggled to do it “without losing the essence of why people loved it in the first place.”

“Finally, I just so happened to be talking to my buddy Nick from Walk the Moon, and I’m like, ‘Are you in L.A.? I’m in the studio right now, on like the 11th version of trying to figure out how to re-record ‘On the Way Down,’ if you want to come by and just lay down some stuff,’” Cabrera recalls. “So he swung by the studio and came up with this part, which is the top of the song, and it’s on the top of the choruses, and it’s very Walk the Moon.”

That riff changed everything. “I was like, ‘Dude, that’s the spark I’ve been waiting for,’” Cabrera says. “After that I was like, ‘Maybe I can get some other friends to do a part.’ I wanted to hear a song I wrote, but somebody else’s take on it.”

The roster of featured artists grew as Cabrera recorded last year. Hanson was the next recruit, and then Cabrera casually invited McLean to join the song while they were golfing together.

“After we golfed, we went straight to the studio and AJ did his Backstreet Boy thing on it,” Cabrera says. “I’ve always known that AJ can sing his ass off, but I didn’t know the extent of how crazy his vocals are until I saw him in the studio going nuts.”

Cabrera actually convinced Fatone to sign on by playing McLean’s vocals for him. “AJ and Joey toured together last year, and I got the chance to open some of the shows DJing,” he says. “But when I played this for Joey — I was like, ‘Joey, AJ did it, so now you’ve got to do it’ — he hears it and he’s like, ‘Damn, I didn’t even know he can hit the falsetto like that.’”

Cabrera loves how the track ended up totally different from the original, and he hopes fans feel the same way. “I do the first chorus, Taylor does the second verse, Drake does the second chorus, Nash is the third chorus, AJ’s just riffing, and Joey’s doing the bridge,” he says. “And then Walk the Moon is the top and the bridge. It’s a cool journey of different vocals on a song we’re celebrating 20 years later.”

Whether they’ll all ever get to perform the 2025 version live together remains to be seen — you try coordinating the schedules of a bunch of grown-up aughts legends. “That would be really tough,” Cabrera says with a laugh. “But you never know. I have some shows in L.A. coming up, so I’ll definitely hit up some of the boys, and hopefully they have enough time to come by.”

Even if he can’t get the rest of the guys to sing it with him, Cabrera plans to include “On the Way Down” on his set list for every show. “The fact that I’m not tired of it is what I’m the happiest about,” he says. “I don’t know why. It’s a song I’ve sung probably over 20,000 times, but I still enjoy every single time I get to perform it and watching people sing along. I’m also the guy who can watch the movie Hitch a hundred times and annoy my wife and everybody around me. But I love it.”

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He’ll also never get sick of his friends sending him videos whenever they hear “On the Way Down.” “Literally every week I get texts from buddies and it’ll just be a video of them in the airport, their local grocery store, their Applebee’s, Walgreens, CVS, Home Depot — I don’t know what channel all these places are playing, but for some reason it still plays ‘On the Way Down’ every day,” he says. “It’s pretty awesome.”

One of those videos inspired another re-recording of “On the Way Down” that Cabrera will release soon — and that one goes hard. “About two years ago somebody sent me a video of this band called Like Ghosts doing a rock version of ‘On the Way Down,’ and it sounds like if 30 Seconds to Mars’ Jared Leto did it,” he says. “I ended up having the label get ahold of them, and so we re-recorded it. It’s like a complete rock version.”

He laughs, adding, “My friends who don’t necessarily listen [to my music] and are like, ‘Ryan, we love you, but your music’s a little soft for my taste,’ I texted a couple of ’em and I’m like, ‘Well, how about now?’ I sent them this version and they’re like, ‘Dude, that’s sick.’”

Cabrera is the king of nostalgia — just watch his appearance on The Hills: New Beginnings for proof of that. But he wants to make one thing very clear: His trademark gravity-defying, spiky coif is staying in the past, where it belongs. “That’s the only thing that will not be coming back — that 2004 hair,” he says. “It’s too expensive, all that hairspray. Too much work.”