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.”