Songfacts®:

• Joseph Somers-Morales is a Texan singer-songwriter who performs under the name of Somo. Though his father played in a Jazz-Rock band called Duck Soup, Somo showed little interest in music himself until he received a piano from his mom for Christmas in 2009. The youngster taught himself how to play by ear and recorded a cover of Chris Brown's "Crawl," which he uploaded onto YouTube. His version soon went viral and Somo teamed up with producer and engineer Cody Tarpley to cut a series of other covers including a medley of Drake's Take Care, which garnered over four million views.
  
  Somo released his first mixtape, My Life, on his birthday September 11, 2012. "It was important to stand out," he said "On My Life, we implemented different styles to show I could write over any type of music. At the same time, it's a cohesive story about my actual life since I started making music. There are party moments. There's heartbreak. There's love. It's real."
• My Life spawned Somo's first hit "Ride." Unsigned and without any radio support at the time, the sexy serenade began selling 10,000 digital tracks weekly. He recalled the writing of the song: "It just happened one night," Somo remembered. "A girl came over, and I was drinking some red wine. I started playing the piano, and I hit my favorite chord. I wrote the hook right away. I was deeply in love with this girl and the song essentially says, 'I'm going to ride. I'd die for you. My love is forever'. Of course, there is that sexual element though. It's fun."
• So why Somo? "That name has been with me for so long," said the singer. "In seventh grade, a girl wrote me a note and called me JoSoMo. I thought it was cool so I made an AIM screen name JoSoMo. All of my football teammates and coaches started calling me SoMo on the field. This is who I am."
• Somo told The Boombox that he feels as if his generation doesn't appreciate the difference between sex and love, both of which are focal points in "Ride." "I feel like our generation lacks in that sensitivity about love and lovemaking," he stated. "And people want to label our generation as sex fiends who just listen to rap music that's just degrading to women or whatever. But that song to me is the emotional transcendence of being in love and the physical part, which I don't think is a bad thing. There's nothing wrong to be in love and to make love."
• This was one of the first songs that Somo wrote. "'Ride' comes off very sensual and sexual at first, you know, to a lot of people," he told MTV News. "But for me, that song, I wrote, I was really in love and basically I was saying I'm going to ride or die for your love and I'm a sensual person so it kind of went into that and it just describes the transcendence of the emotional part of love going into the physical part."
• The song was covered by Chase Rice as a bonus track on the Party Edition of his Ignite The Night album.