You & I
Rita Ora may be 11 years deep into her multifaceted career, but the versatile star is still finding new ways to challenge herself. Her third studio album, *You & I*, finds Ora in a new phase of life, and the record—a confident collection of bright, shiny dance-pop tunes—serves as an update on the personal and professional changes she has experienced since 2018’s *Phoenix*. *You & I* marks a number of firsts for Ora as an artist. Where her previous releases have boasted a laundry list of credits from some of the world’s biggest hitmakers, Ora herself co-wrote every song on this project, with Grammy-nominee Oak Felder (Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato) handling the bulk of the production duties. “I’m looking at this as the new era of my career,” Ora tells Apple Music. “I’m re-establishing myself as the artist I really want to be, which is a singer-songwriter. It was a really important transition for me to get into the lab and be a part of the DNA of this album. I wanted to get as personal as possible, and that had to stem from me.” Despite her ubiquitous tabloid presence, Ora’s musical output has historically served as a vehicle for more generalized emotional themes, maintaining a degree of separation between her intimate relationships and her art. Her romance with—and eventual marriage to—Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi inspired her to approach the creative process a little differently this time round. “Getting married was a big step for me, and I didn’t want to ignore that within my art,” says Ora. “It was about preserving the moment. I wanted to capture the feeling of what I was going through and remember it forever.” The album, then, is a love story, but it is one that treats “once upon a time…” and “happily ever after…” with equal importance. Songs like the euphoric, Fatboy Slim-interpolating “Praising You” and the title track—an emotive, first-dance-ready ballad written the day after Ora’s own wedding—give way to a more introspective back half. Over the marching beat of “Shape of Me” and the rise and fall of piano and percussion on “Notting Hill,” Ora honors her love for herself, for her friends and family, even her love of life itself, as she emerges from her “messy twenties” with a new level of self-knowledge. “I’m just more aware of my powers and strengths,” she says. “I’m more in control of myself. I’ve learned how to preserve my energy for the right things. My biggest inspirations are artists like Jennifer Lopez and Kylie Minogue—these people that just reinvent themselves again and again. I feel like my thirties are just endless opportunities that I can see coming up and happening if I put the work in. I’m really focused on keeping that train going for the next 10 years. It’s really exciting to feel like I’m reintroducing myself.” Here, Ora brings us up to speed with her latest evolution, track by track. **“Don’t Think Twice”** “I thought this was a really great opening to the love story that inspired my album. It’s about the journey of coming to terms with where you’re at in your life and saying, ‘Let’s just do it. Are you in?’ The live strings really made the difference. We originally did them electronically, then Oak rerecorded them with a live orchestra in London, and they sound fucking great.” **“You Only Love Me”** “This song is about not knowing where you stand when you start seeing someone, and you’re like, ‘Do you only want to see me when you’re mash-up or do you actually really love me?’ At the beginning of my relationship, I realized, ‘Oh, this feels different. I really want this… Do I say that or am I going to look mad?’ I never really thought about how I looked before and, for the first time I was that girl, caring about what he thought of me. I loved that feeling of being out of control. I wasn’t afraid of it. It was a really romantic, endearing, beautiful place to be in.” **“Praising You” (feat. Fatboy Slim)** “I’m a huge fan of Fatboy Slim—he’s one of the reasons I love electronic music—and I started thinking, hypothetically, if he were to say yes to me sampling ‘Praise You,’ what would the song sound like? I wanted to give him something where he could see the life in it, and that I had this passion and drive, and I really believed in it, because I really did. So we made ‘Praising You,’ and if he didn’t like it, of course, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. But he said, ‘You’ve really taken this sample that I took from this song from the ’70s and you’ve done a really good job. You’ve really brought it into the now. I’m very proud to hand it over to you.’ I loved that, that was a huge deal for me. Performing it together for the first time at Glastonbury was emotional because it went from me very much stalking him at that festival, wanting to meet him as a fan, to being on stage with him for his headline slot. It felt fantastic.” **“Unfeel It”** “This started out as more of a guitar song. Oak was like, ‘We need to give it energy,’ and I was really adamant that I wanted to avoid using the perfect pop, ’80s formula from the past couple of years. I was very conscious about giving a different sort of flavor. So he came up with this euphoric pace that moved it into a new EDM realm.” **“Waiting for You”** “This is the ‘Old Rita’ Rita song—all the stuff I used to do with Sigala and features like that. I’m still Rita, I’m always going to be Rita, and I wanted to really remind people you can still come to a Rita show and feel like you’re in a field. You can really let loose to a lot of my dance songs and that’s why I love doing them.” **“You & I”** “I wrote this song hungover the day after I got married. I’d been wanting to work with \[Canadian producer\] Cirkut for such a long time, and I knew I couldn’t let him down, so I just went in and told him the truth. I was like, ‘Hey, I got married yesterday! I’m hanging, and I want to make a wedding song.’ So we did. It was the easiest song on the album. We did it in like an hour and a half. It has wedding bells in it and it references all my favorite love songs of all time. That was a fun game—working out how to fit all those songs into it.” **“That Girl”** “We sampled the Eddie Murphy song ‘Party All the Time’ for this track. I love him, and I love that song. It started out with me thinking if I were to walk in and see a fun girl at a party, I’d want to dance with that girl. I’d want to hang out with her, she looks like she knows what she’s doing—so what would that sound like as a song? It’s about acknowledging and appreciating that persona. I feel like we all have it within us.” **“Shape of Me”** “My mum is really thick-skinned, and she’s had to be to bring us up, I think. She’s a strong woman and she does a really good job. I love how she just picks herself back up. We’re both resilient, hardworking people. ‘Shape of Me’ pays homage to what my mum taught me and how she shaped who I am today, and that extends to all the women and the female energies in my life. I love the lyric ‘Don’t you worry babe, you got my blood in your veins.’ I think it’s such a comforting, gangster line.” **“Look at Me Now”** “When Oak came onboard to help executive produce the record, I told him the story is important, so wherever the music comes from it needs to fit the narrative. I didn’t write this track with him, but he was all about making sure the story made sense, and this song is really about reminding people of the strength and resilience it took for me to get here. Even after all the obstacles, I’ve found a way to still be here.” **“Girl in the Mirror”** “I was really inspired by Christina Aguilera’s music video for ‘Beautiful’ and this song is my version of that. I faced my fears and put them in the song. It’s about self-love. The majority of the album is about self-love. It’s not all about me and my husband, it’s about me and myself, me and my fans, me and my friends. I don’t want people to feel like you need to depend on anyone to bring you happiness, because it’s you that has to do that.” **“Notting Hill”** “Growing up in Notting Hill was exactly like I describe it in this song. £2 shots! We would go to this bar called Mau Mau and they’d let me sing karaoke. Life was so easy—there were no worries, no problems. Me and my friends were always gassing each other up. When you’re a kid, you feel like you’re so smart, you think you’re some big shot, and then you grow up and realize you actually didn’t know anything. But I had a really amazing friend group that were just so supportive of me. This is their favorite song.” **“I Don’t Wanna Be Your Friend”** “It was so lovely to go through the process of making this album and having somebody there that was super supportive, making sure I felt proud of what I was creating. I’ve never had that before. It made me more honest, more vulnerable, more open. This song is just a reminder that I’m in it. I don’t want us to be friends. I want us to be more than that and here it is. Full circle.”
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