Songfacts®:

• Recorded for Jessie Ware's sixth album, Superbloom, "Ride" finds her leaning hard into seduction, but with a sharp wink. Built on Italo-house pulse, disco shimmer and a swaggering sense of fun, the song turns cowboy imagery into a knowingly over-the-top erotic playground. The title works two ways: A literal Western cue and a double entendre so unsubtle it practically arrives wearing spurs. For Ware, that was the point. After some of the sweeter sensuality elsewhere on Superbloom, "Ride" is meant to break the perfume bottle and let in a little mischief.
• "Ride" opens with a synth interpolation of the iconic theme from Sergio Leone's 1966 classic spaghetti Western film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
  
  "I think I talked about a cowboy in the first verse, so then I started whistling Ennio Morricone's famous The Good, The Bad And The Ugly theme tune over this kind of Italo house beat Ware told NME. "The song was built around that moment, and there's a whip in there and galloping hooves."
• Ware wrote "Ride" in 2024 with her friend, singer-songwriter Jack Peñate, producer and DJ Karma Kid and Clarence Coffee Jr. of The Monsters and The Strangerz production team. Stuart Price (Madonna, The Killers) helped Karma Kid produce.
• Though it was the first song written for Superbloom, Ware road-tested it sparingly, debuting it at Glastonbury's NYC Downlow in 2024, then sitting on it for nearly two years before release. Few songs have spent so long in the stable before being let out to gallop.
• The video, directed by Thomas James and featuring James Norton (Happy Valley, Grantchester) as Ware's brooding cowboy foil, leans gleefully into that fantasy, blending spaghetti Western iconography with nods to Fifty Shades of Grey. Ware's Fifty Shades connection runs deeper than just the video: Her slow jam "Meet Me In the Middle" features in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, making the nod feel like a knowing wink to fans.
  
  "James is a friend, and we were recently at our friend Jack Peñate's performance and I asked him, 'James, do you ride a horse, and would you be up for being a sexy cowboy in the video?,'" Ware told The Daily Mail. "I sent him the song, he loved it, and I'm so grateful that he made this happen."
  
  Ware added filming the video was an act of "reclaiming my sexual identity" in her "frenzied 40s."
• Released as the second single from Superbloom, "Ride" acts as the album's unruly foil to its songs about family and enduring love. Where other tracks explore intimacy's softer edges, this one kicks open the saloon doors.