FREYA RIDINGS
Long tipped as the next Florence & The Machine, Freya Ridings waxes lyrical on the ins and outs of songwriting with Carl Marsh.
What made you decide to go with your record label, Good Soldier Songs – a ‘proper’ independent – instead of one of the majors?
Well, they are a proper indie label. Literally when I first came into the office, there were five people sat around a kitchen table, that kind of vibe [laughs]. They are not all around a kitchen now, but it was such a small team, and I loved that. I love that family-type thing where everyone is working together mentality, and it meant that they had a lot of faith in me.
There was some interest from some of the majors before I signed with Good Soldier in 2016, but they were always kind of saying that I’d have to write happier songs and I didn’t think this felt right. When I met Good Soldier, they said that I could keep my second name and play the songs you want to play. It was just a beautiful revelation, and I was so grateful to them for that.
It sounds like you didn’t want to lose control of your music.
You learn so much from yourself in those situations, and I was lucky enough that I’d had a few years in the wilderness because I almost signed to a major but then I didn’t want to. I had those years to crystallise who I was without any interest from anyone [laughs]. So when you meet the right person, like in a relationship, for me, it felt like the perfect match. They were small and indie, and I wanted to make music that wasn’t, at the time, that mainstream.
With your songwriting, in particular debut single Lost Without You, do you get most of your material from life events that may not have made for great memories?
You do have that weird perspective that you can turn some of those ‘darkest days’ into something that can completely change your life as that did. It took many years of writing songs that people didn’t connect with to try and find the one that they did. I was blown away that the song was one that came from such a real place, because after I wrote it I didn’t think I would actually play it live. It was really strange to see people take the song into their lives that much.
What made you decide to sing it live?
I think it was when I played it to my mum and she started crying. She doesn’t cry that often, and we had this little moment where she said, “I really feel like if you played that, people will want to hear it”, and I just thought to myself that it was just too personal. I believe that’s when everything changed, and I stopped doing the upbeat kind of guitar covers in pubs, and I started playing the piano songs that I had written at home.
The process of writing songs may differ for each songwriter – what’s yours?
That’s a really strange one as to this day, I can’t read music, and I’ve never been able to. So for me, the place that I have turned to in my darkest times has always been a piano. At school, I didn’t have a lot of friends because I am a redhead, and very tall and different to the other kids [laughs]. Being able to turn to a piano was almost like turning to a friend in times of need. That’s what I have always done.
For all the storms in my life, it’s the kind of thing that anchors me to who I am. I would have written songs until the day I die anyway, but the fact that I get to do this as a job now is just a beautiful thing. I shut my eyes, and I see what happens because I am writing from a very deep and subconscious place; it’s not a very conscious thinking, it’s more of a feeling.
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