After a turbulent few years, the Londoner embraced a spirit of rebirth and renewal on her third album, as she wrote songs to help her—and us—feel stronger. “Half of this album is love and the other half is war,” Ridings tells Apple Music. Indeed, propelled by Ridings’ powerhouse voice, Mother of Pearl sweeps purposefully between the primal, arena-ready anthemics of “Euphoria” and “Undefeated” and more intimate, piano-led moments such as “I Have Always Loved You” and “If This Is a Dream” (you’ll notice, too, vivid Celtic imagery dotted across the record, as on the Florence + the Machine-esque rocker “Wild Horse”). Making the album, says Ridings, felt like an act of rebellion. After her 2019 self-titled debut—and following huge hits “Lost Without You” and “Castles”—a familiar, cautionary tale unfolded: Ridings was teamed with seasoned songwriters, some of whom she had no rapport with, for 2023 record Blood Orange. “You write a song on your own and it does really well,” she says, “and everyone’s like, ‘Have you thought about writing with 20 men you’ve never met?’” It was a crushing time, compounded by Ridings parting ways with her label and her manager, but Mother of Pearl felt like a “rebirth” (plus, she’s since signed to a new label and found a more supportive team). “A big part of creating this album was radically accepting myself as the artist I actually am, maybe instead of the artist that people in the industry wanted me to be,” she says. “This album was a real return to self, to the artist that I know I am. If people could leave this album feeling slightly stronger than they did before, that would be my goal.” Read on as Ridings walks us through each powerful and affirming song on Mother of Pearl. “Euphoria” “This song was written for my second album, but no one around me at that time seemed to like it. Fortunately, my husband [folk singer Ewan J Phillips] was always a really big champion so he was like, ‘Why don’t we produce it together just for fun?’ I’m not a drummer, but he gave me this massive drum, and I started playing a beat and singing over it. Then he added cello and guitar, but kept it raw, so it felt very Celtic and Boadicea-like. And in that form, ‘Euphoria’ was the song that got me signed to [her new label] BMG.” “Wild Horse” “After the last album, my husband and I moved to America for a year, mainly because I was distraught after being dropped by my previous label. I just needed to rebuild myself somewhere new. We made loads of friends there, including Sam de Jong, an incredible producer who’s also the loveliest man. He saw I was feeling sad and suggested we jam on guitar. I was like, ‘I just miss feeling free,’ and I don’t know if I was manifesting, but this song poured out. The one-take vocal I sang in that room is what you hear on the song now.” “I Have Always Loved You” “I wrote this song on Valentine’s Day with Toby Gad, a producer who’s good at big, heart-driven ballads—he co-wrote John Legend’s ‘All of Me.’ Toby asked me for the greatest love story of my life, so I told him how I met my husband. It wasn’t plain sailing: there was a lot of back and forth when we were trying to assert boundaries and growing emotionally at different speeds. But we always loved one another, even when we were just friends. When I sang it at a gig recently, my husband welled up, so I think I did a good job.” “Dancing in the Kitchen” “While I was making my second album the way people told me to, I was also writing songs like ‘Dancing in the Kitchen’ on the side. One day, my co-writer Benjamin Francis Leftwich told me about To Carry a Whale, his album about overcoming addiction, then asked, ‘What’s your whale?’ So I told him about how scared and isolated I felt growing up and the way I overcame those negative feelings by dancing in the kitchen. When I leaked a snippet of this song last year, I gained 80,000 new followers, so it really resonates with people.” “Undefeated” “I wrote this song in LA with an amazing producer called Jon Levine—when I was feeling quite defeated, ironically! John was kind enough to invite us over for Friday night dinner, so I felt really comfortable with him before we started working together. On the way to the session, I was like, ‘I know this sounds cheesy, but I want to write a song with a boxing metaphor. Like, even when you’re flat on the ground, as long as you’re still breathing, you can get up and fight again.’ I just really needed to hear that message as I rebuilt myself.” “R U O K?” “Someone I love very much was struggling, and frankly, I was really scared they were going to die. When I got to my Airbnb in LA, I saw these massive letters on the bedroom wall: ‘R U O K?’ The next day, I went into the studio with Rick Nowels and sang this song as a stream of consciousness. To me, it feels like a panic attack where you care so much about someone else being OK that you realize you’re not OK either. I couldn’t express this in real life, so I said it in a song that’s like a gothic rock opera.” “Battleship” “I wrote this song with my brother when we were jamming at the family home. It was literally right before I moved out, so it’s been around for a while. There’s a lot of nautical imagery in my songwriting, and to me, something about ‘Battleship’ sounded like the ‘ding ding!’ of a radar. The lyrics are essentially a metaphor for realizing that the more you care about someone, the more you have to lose. It’s about shifting power dynamics in a relationship and saying to that person, ‘Please don’t hurt me again, because I think I would die.’” “Wicker Woman” “I wrote this song around the same time as ‘Battleship.’ But much later, when I was about to record it with producer Jenn Decilveo, I felt the second verse wasn’t set in stone. So, me and my family sat around the kitchen table until 3 am working on the lyrics: My dad wrote a line, my mum wrote a line, my brother wrote a line.” “Mother of Pearl” “This is probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. It’s about someone I can’t really talk about in interviews, because it’s not necessarily my story to tell. But what I can say is there’s a grief that has rippled through my family that I’ve never explored in a song before. After I released ‘Lost Without You,’ so many people shared their experiences of grief with me, but I always felt like I was holding my cards close to my chest. Now, with ‘Mother of Pearl,’ I’m being as open as possible and sharing my own grief with them.” “If This Is a Dream” “This is another song I wrote with Toby Gad after he asked me to share a great love story. It’s about how my parents met, which is like folklore in our family, because they’ve been married for nearly 42 years now! I particularly loved writing the part about my mum’s bravery: how she went to the theater by herself because she didn’t know anyone, then met the love of her life. Toby asked me to sing it with a string quartet at his gig in London last year. It happened to be my parents’ anniversary, so they ended up with tears in their eyes.” “Strength in Me” “I wrote this at my piano in the living room. I thought no one would ever hear it, but my husband sent the demo to Alex Seaver [aka Mako], an amazing producer we worked with on the Arcane TV soundtrack. What came back was this incredible mix of raw feeling and cinematic production with a James Bond feel. It makes me want to strut around a London park feeling strong again. It felt really apt to end the album with something I wrote alone at the piano. Because when people underestimate me, it’s like rocket fuel for my creativity.”