Defying the odds - Freya Ridings overcame dyslexia to write her own music

Reuters - Her music teachers gave up on her because she couldn't read music - but Freya Ridings managed to overcome dyslexia and feelings of isolation in her teenage years to write her own album and headline venues around the world. The up-and-coming British singer-songwriter won over fans this summer with her soulful ballad "Lost Without You", which peaked at no. 9 in the UK music charts. Talking to Reuters before performing at London's Shepherds Bush Empire in October she revealed how challenges at school propelled her to write her own music. "I found school sort of very strange place where I couldn't really be myself because I wasn't very academic. I was hugely dyslexic so reading music was a real struggle for me. And so all my all music teachers just kind of one by one just kind of gave up on me, they were like 'you can't read music, you can't play it'," she said. "I basically had to write my own songs because people wouldn't teach me other people's," Ridings added. Currently, on a tour taking her to Paris, Amsterdam and the United States, the 24-year-old's debut studio album is set to be released early next year. The theme for the album is a current talking point - loneliness. Ridings, who grew up in North London, said that while she lived through a hard time, she was also grateful to have the time to discover herself. I know it sounds a bit sad but I feel like growing up I was so isolated that this was the only time that I could kind of be myself and I'm would just go to the pianos at lunchtime and tell the kind of stories you would tell to a friend to the piano. And at the time it was so hard and I look back and I'm so grateful that I had that time on my own to kind of find out who actually was," she said. Ridings is next due to play at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, California, on Friday and Saturday (November 23-24).