Photo by David Beale on Unsplash
“I struggled so much at school with dyslexia, and I really found it so difficult in so many ways. When I found music, it just became an anchor that got me through the hardest school years…I couldn’t read music, and all my music teachers gave up on me one by one because I couldn’t read music. So literally I just had to write my own songs because nobody else would teach me.”
23 year-old Freya Ridings now has over 1.6 million monthly users on Spotify and close to 23 million cumulative plays. Warner Music boss recently said “Freya has the potential to be the biggest artist in the world…she’s travelling in a musical lane owned by Ed Sheeran and Adele.”
Freya did her first open mic show at age 11. She looked back on the time and said “it was one of those lightning-bolt moments where I suddenly found what I wanted to do.”
Freya’s big hit, Lost Without You.
Freya would go on to attend the famous Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology like Adele and Amy Winehouse before her, but she was embarrassed by her inability to play like “classically trained people.”
In a BBC story, she reflected:
“Now I look back and I’m so grateful for that. It was one of the most defining moments of my life, as it meant I had to write my own songs.
“It just became the greatest love of my life and really anchored me through some of the hardest years.
“Now it’s just this incredible time where the songs I wrote in isolation are actually the thing that are connecting me with people.”
Today Freya says that she is grateful for her dyslexia.
“Her advice for other would-be songwriters who aren’t necessarily great academically is this: ‘If you can hear it and work it out, you can ‘write’ it.’
This is unofficially known as the Sir Paul McCartney method – and he did all right for himself.
“I never sit down with a pen – I just let it come into my subconscious.”
One of Freya’s new songs, Love is a Fire.
