Oh to be loved like The Ridleys’ songs

It is a curious longing, perhaps, yet one that returns every time their melodies fade into my headphones through long rides home and the stillness of solitary hours. I do not only marvel at their music; I am enraptured by their way of seeing. 

        In a language both delicate and arresting, poetic without pretense, they compose love as something intimately acquainted yet newly illuminated. It feels as though they listen to the cadence of my heart and answer in kind.

Over time, I have grown to see that The Ridleys does not simply and aimlessly storytell about love. Across their discography, love epitomizes in countless forms as unbidden and receptive, patient and committed, passionate and aspirational, reassuring yet honest, or imperfect yet freeing. Each song is a distinct stream, by which we wade through an underflow of what has always been lived yet partly understood.

As a girl who has been gently moved by their art, I am caught in a voyage to glide along their progression. What is love, and what does it become in the words of my dearest band?

Love is unbidden | DYWTBM

Imagine standing in a crowded bar in the thick of a restless night, brimming with tattles and passing glances. Of all the people constellated in that hour, what are the odds that your gaze would come to rest on one and nowhere else? Such is love, unbidden. It is love that finds us even in the act of searching for it. It slips past reason and by the time logic alights with its questions, the heart has already cast its vote. 

Meaning does not give birth to love; love gives birth to meaning. Thus, love may be one of the purest things we are ever privileged to hold in this world, just as being in love is one of the purest iterations of ourselves we ever get to be. 

        So when something beautifully inexplicable arrives against all good sense, isn’t it a chance worth taking?

Love is receptive | Germany and Rome

Love may find its path to us, but a road to Germany and Rome leaves every mile that follows in our choosing. 

        The lyrics’ imagery of travel and distance portrays love as an art of meeting halfway. We enter love as two people carrying separate histories and unspoken geographies of the self, yet to enfold it down to the marrow is to loosen borders of familiarity so a new vantage point can take root. Others may call it compromise, but it appears more as a creation. 

         A shared home is not built by one person crossing entirely into the other’s world, but by both continuing to move until a haven resides in the space between them.

Love is patient | Cold Feet

What is patience in love, if not more than waiting dressed in another name? 

         Through The Ridleys’ Cold Feet, patience is but an active process of press-and-pause. It guides without grasping, embraces without enclosing, and teaches love without ever turning love into instruction itself. It is close enough to be felt, yet open enough for clumsy footfalls to catch their own timing. 

In the no-rush, the verses subtly capture that patience is not only offered outward but turned inward as well. We, too, learn to give ourselves the right measure of love, kindness, and time — to learn, kindly and without haste, how to love at the right pace. The dance wanders on, not because both already knew the steps when it began, but because neither is left behind while learning them.

Love is committed | Be with You & KYGM

Eventually, we refuse to let love fossilize into mere converging trices and factor it into reweighing and reshaping the contours of our lives. That is when we settle into love as a commitment. 

Both of these songs encapsulate commitment as a muted vow of effort, pulled through the simple gravity of wanting to wake into the same sight, every day for the rest of their lives. The lines are braided into responses and challenges of how — how do we make what we have last into forever? What is laudable about Be With You is its unembellished emphasis on the importance of tending to our own behaviors that ripple into and affect the other.

I’m gonna work on my temper, while you learn to speak your mind some more. 

I’ll be more of a shelter, and less of a storm.

Then, KYGM adjoins that as we mature into the love we commit to, we must do so alongside the person our heart chose.

If life were a maze and we’re both lost

Then why don’t we get out together

If this is a puzzle then let’s try to solve it

Be With You and KYGM harmonize in this beautiful realization that the future is not a fixed destination, but something we unceasingly make and remake in every part of ourselves — that even ordinary days are carefully and lovingly authored from the willful strokes of one another.

Love is passionate | Running to Vancouver & Running out of Songs 

The Ridleys agrees that love finds its peak in the forward tilt of its own force. To love is to be devoted with fervor to what you love. Running to Vancouver is a symbolic journey of what seemed insurmountable made traversable, particularly in the divide between the depth of feeling and the act of decision. The mind tends to entertain what it would have dismissed outright in the limits of memory, alongside as money, physicality, and practicality are pared down to temporary footnotes in a larger emotional script. 

In the same breath, passion also implies the readiness to endure hardship and sacrifice for the sake of love. In Running Out of Songs, the speaker has written countless songs, yet tightens in the perception that none of them are sufficient to retain whatever overflows them. There is weariness in accepting that words can only stretch so far when trying to expound something as tremendous as love, more so when it is entangled with old heartbreaks and the fragile awareness that even this love might break too.

The art of passion here is the faithfulness to struggle in spite of — to strive for love with the same extremity that first set it in motion, even when articulation falters or fear clouds foresight. Wherever we are in this earthly plane, no Vancouver is ever too far when we are driven by passion — even as we run out of songs along the course, even as our voices hit their tipping edge, all in the name of love.

Love is aspirational | Someday 

“Aspirational” may sound indistinguishable from “committed” or “passionate,” but The Ridleys suggests that it may rather be the intertwining of the two: what urges one to stay committed to what they are passionate about, and what makes one passionate about what they have committed themselves to?

Someday dreams of a pretty ring, a family car, and a bigger room. Behind the material possessions per se, the song affirms the enthusiasm of not only aiming to build a life with our beloved, but drawing the most out of that life together. We seek love in every hope and horizon where it can be embodied. Yet, once those aspirations finally come to fruition, love discovers that what mattered most was never the milestones themselves — it was the undeviating commitment and passion that propelled them. 

In the end, The Ridleys evokes that while the future may alter or peel away everything else within that co-lived journey, love, in all constancy, is not one of them.

Love is reassuring | Meaningful Silence

Love does not end in having found a lover and a beloved, but extends into a friend nestled in between, with whom you share a bond of mutual affection, trust, and loyalty at their most tender and secure form. From this, another dimension of love unfurls: reassuring. As you weather both storms and clear skies alike, you get to witness each other in ascent and descent, in brilliance and breaking — in a shared vulnerability translated to its own love language.

Love then emerges not only as a place of intensity, but also as a place of repose, where we may uncloak our deepest unrests with no accompanying doom. There, it feels as if no trouble can stack up because you have each other — and that alone is enough to withstand almost anything. 

Love is honest | Yvaine

Of all the somewhat anticipated natures of love, Yvaine provides a fresh perspective. Love is honest, and no, it does not merely point to transparency about our whereabouts or wayward thoughts. Its mellow hum echoes of mortality and its inevitabilities, acknowledging that love is the sole impetus capable of greeting life’s most absolute truths eye to eye. Still, it is love that ensures neither has to face the unbearable cold alone.

There is no denial of impermanence; love is spoken precisely because impermanence exists. Yvaine shifts love into a paradoxical solace by revealing how brief everything is while painting that brevity as what makes each moment exquisitely luminous and worthwhile. Yvaine tells us that although love may not save us from farewell and death, it steadies us to deal with them — and offers a splendid reason for drifting into love at all.

Love is imperfect | Strangest Love

Nothing about love is neat or symmetrical; in reality, it is unruly and temperamental of its own direction. Love really is no stranger in this world of scattered ruins, is it? 

         Strangest Love leads us into the insight that love can be both an anchor and ache, or both grounding and exasperating. What makes this imperfection profound anyhow is it dismantles the illusion of a “correct” approach to love. There is no perfect state of love standing somewhere ahead, for it traipses through a long and friction-worn landscape, and it is only natural that it leaves with a few wounds of its own. This song therefore asks not whether love can avoid being flawed, but whether those flaws are entitled to the final word.

Love is freeing | Stay

Nevertheless, not every love is meant to be indefinitely fought for, especially when preserving the relationship exhausts more of the soul than what it can infuse.

Everyone in love dreads the day they may be separated from their beloved, yet in many instances, setting them free becomes the purest expression of love one can give forth. It is when it means forbidding their confinement in a pact they can no longer genuinely inhabit.

           In the act of letting go, love safeguards their right to depart and evolve into someone who no longer fits beside us, with no punishment or resentment involved. All at once, this freedom is equally an act of love toward oneself too, such that we honor our heart’s capacity to feel and heal as well as the adamance of our worth. 

Stay basically invites us to stay a little longer, look to the integrity of the love we live within, under its two placid touchstones: that we do not shelter someone at the expense of their becoming, and that we do not lose ourselves in the pursuit of keeping them.

Love is… love | Love Is

After all is said and done, love is nothing more — and nothing less — than love itself. 

        The Ridleys, too, ultimately circles back to its genesis through its All These and More single, Love Is. At its heart, the song gathers every fragment of affection and lifts them like evidence, only to derive that they are reflections and not alternate definitions.

There is no equation vast enough to contain what love truly is. Love remains love as it is. As The Ridleys infers, its glow does not emanate from landing at a singular concept, but from being at peace with not knowing yet. We just have to let love be a mystery that defines us fain, and inspires us to live more sensibly within the evanescent gift of this lifetime.