Going back to her roots, she’d play the works-in-progress at small caf\u00e9 shows across LA, using audience feedback to refine the songs before taking them back to the studio.<\/p>\n
Fans who attended those gigs will know that Ridings hasn’t completely abandoned her proclivity for a heartbroken love song.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“It’s like folklore in our family, we know every single phrase of that story,” she says.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“She decided to go, because she’s got moxie,” says Ridings.<\/p>\n
“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’.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“He was so embarrassed about that back in the day, and now I’ve literally put it into song,” she laughs.<\/p>\n
“He can never not be known as double denim man. But he rocks it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Going back to her roots, she’d play the works-in-progress at small caf\u00e9 shows across LA, using audience feedback…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-501144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}