I Have Always Loved You

The Courage in Simplicity

There are four words that most people spend their whole lives finding the right moment to say. Not because the words are complicated, but because the weight of them makes the speaker vulnerable in ways that almost nothing else can. "I have always loved you." It is a declaration that does not ask for anything in return, does not negotiate, does not hedge. It simply admits something true.

That is the territory Freya Ridings walks into with this song, and she does so without flinching.

Background

Released on March 13, 2026, "I Have Always Loved You" arrived as the third single ahead of Ridings' third studio album, "Mother of Pearl," due May 29, 2026 on BMG.^[1] It was written on Valentine's Day at collaborator Toby Gad's studio in Los Angeles, a fact that sounds almost too symbolic to be true, yet was simply the circumstance of the day.^[2] Gad, who has written for John Legend, Beyonce, and Demi Lovato, posed Ridings a question that would unlock the song: what was the greatest love story of your life?

Her pause before answering was itself the beginning of something. The story felt, she said, "incredibly private to share," the kind of personal history you carry carefully inside you, unsure whether anyone else would understand it.^[3] But then it came out "almost cosmically and magically, like a voicemail message" in a rush of honesty that surprised even her.^[2] The song was co-written with Gad and Lauren Conklin and produced by Gad, with a music video directed by Nic Minns at Asylum Chapel.

It followed two other singles from the album cycle. "Wicker Woman" arrived in October 2025, and "Wild Horse" appeared in early 2026. Where those songs opened chapters, "I Have Always Loved You" feels like the emotional center of the collection: a confession addressed to someone who already knows the story but perhaps needed to hear it stated plainly.

The Freya Ridings Origin Story

To understand what makes this song feel so personal, it helps to understand who Ridings is and where she comes from. She was born in North London in 1994 into a household where creativity was the ambient condition. Her father, Richard Ridings, is the actor and voice artist best known internationally as the voice of Daddy Pig in "Peppa Pig." Her mother, Cathy Jansen-Ridings, is a playwright. Music was everywhere: her father taught her guitar, her mother played piano and harp.^[4]

Ridings attended The BRIT School, the South London performing arts institution that also produced Adele and Amy Winehouse.^[4] She has spoken of being dyslexic, which made learning other people's songs through conventional notation difficult. The result was that she turned inward early, composing her own material from the beginning. What might have been a limitation became, over time, a creative disposition toward personal truth over technical exercise.

Her breakthrough came with "Lost Without You," a 2017 debut single that gained massive traction when it was featured on "Love Island" in 2018, eventually reaching number nine on the UK Singles Chart.^[4] She became the first female artist to write and perform a solo UK Top 10 hit independently, without label infrastructure. Her 2019 self-titled debut album charted at number three in the UK, accumulated over a billion streams, and earned her a BRIT Award nomination for British Female Solo Artist. By the time "I Have Always Loved You" arrived, she had been making music for nearly a decade. The song carries the weight of that accumulated experience.

What the Song Is About

Ridings has described the song as telling "a love story spanning years, with rollercoasters of growing up together, apart, then together again."^[2] That summary alone describes something more complicated and more honest than most romantic songs attempt. The standard pop love song catches a single moment: a falling in love, a breaking apart. This song takes a wider view, acknowledging that real love is rarely linear. It includes absence. It includes the years when two people drift or are pulled into separate orbits. And it includes the return.

What distinguishes the narrative is its refusal to dramatize the pain. The rollercoasters are acknowledged, but the song is not a meditation on the difficulty of love. It is instead what Ridings calls "a raw, honest tribute to how simple love can be."^[1] That phrase is worth sitting with: simple love. Not uncomplicated, not without history, but simple in the sense that, stripped of everything else, it comes down to one thing being true. It was always there. It never stopped.

The song places the listener inside a moment of finally-said honesty. Rather than building toward a revelation, it circles one, approaching it from different angles, finding it still true each time. The narrator moves through moments in the relationship: early closeness, the distance that followed, the recognition when things came back together. The emotional anchor is consistent throughout. This has always been true. Even when it went unspoken.

Like a Spell Being Cast

Ridings described the writing of the song as feeling "cosmically and magically" arrived at, comparing it to a voicemail message: something recorded in one go, personal, direct, slightly nervous, but honest.^[2] That description says something important about the song's texture. There is no calculated cleverness, no ornamental complexity. The production, handled by Gad, is understated in a way that frames the voice rather than competing with it.

The music video, shot at Asylum Chapel by director Nic Minns (who has worked with Lewis Capaldi, Ed Sheeran, and Anne-Marie), leans into that intimacy.^[5] The chapel setting evokes both the sacred and the private: the kind of space where vows are made, but also where the most unguarded versions of ourselves are kept. There is something fitting about a confession of enduring love being housed in a building built for exactly that.

Ridings said the song "feels like the beginning of a new chapter."^[1] That phrasing is quietly significant. She is not describing the song as a closing statement, a tying-up of something old. She is describing it as an opening: as if saying the true thing out loud makes the next part possible.

The Album Context: Water and Depth

"I Have Always Loved You" belongs to an album cycle that Ridings has described in elemental terms. Her first album had a palette of red and black: fire, pain. Her second was orange and green, earthy and organic. "Mother of Pearl" is water: "the big blue sea, with all the depth and ancient power of an ocean: it's grief and it's ancestry, the known and the unknown."^[2]

In that framework, this song is not an anomaly but a coherence. Water holds things. It moves around obstacles rather than through them. It returns in tides. A love that has always been present, that has survived gaps and growth and years of reinvention, has something oceanic about it: patient, persistent, vast enough to contain distance without being diminished by it.

The album explores grief, ancestry, family bonds, and the reclaiming of artistic identity after years of industry pressure.^[2] "I Have Always Loved You" sits among songs that concern themselves with what endures: not just romantic love, but the deeper structures of a life.

Sincerity as an Artistic Position

There is a specific kind of courage in writing a song this sincere. Contemporary pop has increasingly trafficked in irony, in emotional self-protection, in the stylized performance of feeling rather than its direct expression. Against that backdrop, a song that simply declares enduring love without qualifications or narrative twists is almost confrontational in its openness.

Ridings has spoken of "I Have Always Loved You" as a story she was not sure she would ever tell publicly, one that felt "almost uncomfortably true."^[3] That discomfort is precisely the point. Songs that cost the songwriter something tend to reach listeners differently. They carry a different kind of weight. They feel less like crafted product and more like direct communication.

The song arrives at a point in Ridings' career where she has spent time reconsidering her relationship to the music industry, seeking collaborators who wanted to hear what she actually had to say rather than what might perform best on particular platforms. The result, at least in this song, is something that sounds like it was written by someone who had stopped asking for permission.

Alternative Readings

The song's span of years invites multiple interpretations. The most straightforward reading is romantic: a love story with interruptions, marked by a shared history of growth and distance. But Ridings' emphasis on "growing up together" opens space for readings that encompass deep friendship, the complicated love of people who have known each other across multiple phases of identity, or even a return to an earlier version of the self.

There is also a reading in which the song is as much about recognition as about love itself. The word "always" carries the weight of retrospect: the feeling of knowing, when you look back, that what you now understand was already present at the beginning. That is a different emotional experience from falling in love in real time. It is the experience of realizing what was already true. The song could be understood as being about the moment when retrospect becomes articulation: when the thing you have always known becomes the thing you finally say.

Conclusion

"I Have Always Loved You" is a song that earns its simplicity. It does not reach for the operatic gesture or the perfectly turned metaphor. It tells a true story in a direct voice, and trusts that to be enough.

Given where Freya Ridings has come from: a childhood steeped in performance and language, a decade of building a career on her own terms, years of songs written from the inside out, this feels less like a departure than an arrival. The beginning of a new chapter, as she put it. The kind that starts not with an ending, but with something finally, carefully, honestly said.