Freya Ridings on buying a plane ticket and reclaiming her career: ‘I felt like a naughty schoolchild’

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Mark SavageMusic correspondent

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Simon Emmett

Freya Ridings broke out with the lush ballad Lost Without You, which became a top 10 hit in 2018

Just because the strident crunch of Freya Ridings’ recent singles conjures up images of a medieval army riding into battle, that doesn’t mean she’s a warrior queen blessed with bottomless self-confidence.

If anything, the recording sessions initially found the singer-songwriter at an all-time low, floored by nerves.

“I was questioning and doubting myself more than I ever had,” she tells BBC News.

“I was actually having panic attacks in the studio… but I was determined to write my way out of it.”

The crisis of confidence began with her previous album, Blood Orange.

Ridings had been thrust into the limelight with her Brit Award-nominated debut in 2017, celebrated for her rich, pure-toned vocals on ballads like Lost Without You and the summery pop masterpiece Castles.

But while that record was largely written at home and recorded with her friend Ollie Green, Ridings says she was pressured into working with a host of A-list producers for the follow-up.

“I hated it,” she says. “It wasn’t my choice to be with those people.”

Looking back, she says, the recording sessions were in “very masculine-dominated” studios, which made it harder to “open up and be vulnerable”.

“I got hammered a little bit. It kind of broke my spirit.”

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The singer received a Brit Award nomination for best female after her debut album spent half a year in the UK Top 40

Compounding the problem, her record label had downsized during the pandemic, and the people who’d nurtured her first record had left. To make matters worse, her relationship with her manager had fallen apart.

Looking back, Ridings calls the situation “toxic”. Although she remains proud of songs like Weekends and Face in the Crowd, she made compromises that went against her instincts as a musician.

“I felt petrified because other people were petrified for me,” she says.

"It wore me down to the point where I was like, ‘Sure, maybe you do know better than me’.

“But as an artist, that just can’t be true, because if you’re being authentic and that’s what’s connecting with people, anything in between just gets in the way.”

Blood Orange was a Top 10 hit in early 2023, but it vanished from the charts after a week.

Soon after, Ridings was dropped by her label. She broke the news to fans in an Instagram live in the midst of what she describes as a “full-on breakdown”.

“I was falling through the cracks,” she says, “but my fans caught me”. With no label and no budget, she sold out a 32-date European tour.

‘I knew I had to get on that plane’

But her troubles weren’t over.

Plotting new music, Ridings wanted to work with Jen Decilveo, the US producer behind Hozier’s Francesca – “one of my favourite songs of all time”.

Her manager not only discouraged the collaboration, but failed to mention that Decilveo had expressed a reciprocal interest in working with her.

It was at that point, she realised, that “I needed to take power away from the people who were controlling me”.

"So I paid for my own ticket and I got on the plane anyway.

“I was crapping myself,” she laughs. "I felt scared, like a naughty schoolchild, because this was the first time in a long time where I hadn’t done exactly what I was told.

“But I lit up. It was like I was possessed. I knew I had to get on that plane.”

Freya Ridings

The singer found a new sense of freedom after fleeing to Los Angeles

Energised by her act of defiance, Ridings spent a year in Los Angeles, writing her way out of despair.

“I didn’t really have the money to do that, but I was determined. I still believed there was something here. It wasn’t dead, and I wanted it to grow back.”

The song that illuminated the path back home was Euphoria, an absolute earthquake of self belief, where Ridings screams with “the rage in my heart as red as my hair”.

“I was stuck and trapped, but I was like, ‘Who would I want to be right now?’” she explains of the character she summoned from her Celtic heritage.

“If anything, I was trying to convince myself of the confidence that I once had so effortlessly.”

It’s a theme she returns to across the record.

“I lеt you shake my faith, but not any more / You’re gonna hеar my name like a thunderstorm,” she declares on Wild Horse, sounding every inch like Florence + The Machine at her most elemental.

On the album closer, Strength In Me, she repeats the line “I know I’m gonna survive this” over and over as the music swells in a thrilling crescendo.

“There’s a theme, Mark! There’s a massive theme,” she explains.

“A lot of these songs were rebellions. I used them to rebuild myself, piece by piece, brick by brick.”

Freya Ridings

The singer road-tested her new material with intimate shows around Los Angeles

Going back to her roots, she’d play the works-in-progress at small café shows across LA, using audience feedback to refine the songs before taking them back to the studio.

Fans who attended those gigs will know that Ridings hasn’t completely abandoned her proclivity for a heartbroken love song.

Album highlights include the striking piano ballad RUOK, where she reaches out to a friend in need; and the delicately woven I Have Always Loved You, about two friends who circle each other, waiting for the right time to declare their true feelings.

There’s even a song that describes the way her parents (playwright Cathy Jansen-Ridings and Peppa Pig voice actor Richard Ridings) met and fell in love in.

“It’s like folklore in our family, we know every single phrase of that story,” she says.

The scene was Coventry, 1983, where her father was performing a one-man show. Her mum had tickets, but nearly skipped the show after her friends bailed.

“She decided to go, because she’s got moxie,” says Ridings.

“It was a very small theatre, and when dad heard her laugh, he was like, ‘There’s sunshine coming out of the crowd’. He knew right then, ‘This is my wife’.”

Her parents are still deeply in love, and the family is incredibly close-knit. Ridings, who has dyslexia, says her mum often helps her write down and edit her “stream of consciousness” lyrics.

But like all families, there’s a lot of affectionate mockery. In the first verse of If This Is A Dream, Ridings outs her father as the sort of person who wore double denim in the 1980s.

“He was so embarrassed about that back in the day, and now I’ve literally put it into song,” she laughs.

“He can never not be known as double denim man. But he rocks it.”

Bartek Smigulski

Ridings will launch her new album with a series of small record store gigs at the end of May

As the sessions for Ridings’ third album progressed, her panic attacks dissolved. She hand-picked producers who shared her belief in the material - Sam De Jong (Gracie Abrams), Fraser T Smith (Adele, Stormzy) and Toby Gad (Beyoncé).

In contrast to her previous record, “It was like being in the studio with friends”.

And when she sent the completed tracks to her manager… he didn’t listen to them for a year, she says.

Unsurprisingly, they no longer work together. Ridings jumped ship to a new team and a new record label, BMG, who “smashed through the big wall of doubt that was put in front of me”.

Titled Mother of Pearl, the album isn’t out until 29 May, but the songs have gone down a storm on Ridings’ recent Australian tour with OneRepublic.

Which reminds me… the last time we spoke, Ridings confessed she’d always dreamt about crowd surfing, but her music was “too sad” to allow it.

So, with stirring anthems like Wicker Woman and Wild Horse on her setlist, has she been tempted to leap off the stage?

“Do you know what? I might have just been posturing in that interview, 'cos I’m terrified of stuff like that,” she says.

“One time I fell off stage in Norway and a load of women caught me in the front row – and, quite honestly, I’m not sure I’d ever have the bravery to do that on purpose.”

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