Ben Barnes Reveals His Mother's Advice Helped Him Make His Debut Album
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00:00Tell me why now's the right time to release an album.
00:04I think my, the motivation behind releasing the first songs that I released three or four years
00:11ago was very much that kind of pandemic fear push in the back that I think a lot of people
00:21had realizing that you never know what's around the corner and that tomorrow is not promised and
00:27that if there is something that you feel passionate about or that you love doing,
00:32you should do it now because life is short and precious and I kept imagining, I think I was
00:37waking up at the beginning of the pandemic when kind of like cold sweats imagining, imagining
00:43myself in my 80s kind of looking back at my life and and regretting that I never kind of pursued
00:51one of the great passions of my life which I tried to, which I had a sort of brief foray into
00:59in my late teens but then kind of just left alone and kept and just kept it like almost like a
01:05secret for myself, my kind of passion for writing songs and playing music and singing and I thought
01:13I basically needed to let go of some fear of judgment that if I put out music people wouldn't
01:17take me seriously as an actor or that if I put out music people would kind of, you know, have
01:23these crazy insights into my personal life or whatever it might be that I was afraid of, I
01:27needed to kind of release those things and realize that there isn't really time on the planet for
01:32that so that was the motivation behind the EP and then I think just seeing the reactions when I first
01:38started touring in Europe and the lovely reactions online, particularly on social
01:44media to the music, watching people kind of do covers of it or dance in their kitchen to it or
01:51do little reels of them hugging their best mates to the songs or pole dancing or whatever it is
01:57that they were doing to the songs, an awful lot of pole dancing, I don't know where that comes from
02:03but it was just so great to see people kind of taking the cue from me if I can do
02:10kind of pop music as a man in his 40s then people can kind of do the thing that
02:16they want to do and I kind of talk about that in the shows a little bit but watching people
02:20kind of do it in real time and really kind of pick up that mantle and just get out and do
02:27the things that they love to the soundtrack that I had kind of made was like
02:32incredibly rewarding. That's awesome, I had read recently you said that you didn't start
02:40playing piano until you were 35, is that true? It is true, I had one lesson when I was about
02:46eight and the teacher was a horrible old witch and she kind of shamed me at the end of the
02:51lesson, at the end of my very first lesson and I was just a little kid and she was
02:57horrible and I remember it quite vividly and I thought well I'm not going back to doing
03:01piano, piano is stupid and it is I know it's really important to like not have regrets in
03:08life and to be really appreciative of everything that's happened to you that's led you here but I
03:12if I had just if I had just gone back the next week because yeah in my mid-30s again I was I just
03:20kind of I actually was talking to I had a conversation with my with my mum about priorities
03:29and she wasn't very well at the time and I said well my priorities are to do this
03:35and this and this and one of them was to play more music and she said to me she's very wise
03:39and she said to me those aren't your priorities those are you know those are those are ways you'd
03:46like to see yourself or those are those are kind of dreams you've got but they're not your priorities
03:50your priorities are the things you make a priority and it really like it was one conversation it
03:55wasn't even a long conversation but it just knocked me to the floor and I thought right I
03:59those things that I want that I think I want to prioritize I have to make an effort to put to the
04:05top of the list and so so yeah I got a few lessons and I just started spending some time there and
04:12now it's become like a really a place of real like solace and and peace for me like after a day of
04:18filming or whatever I just sit at the piano and play some chords you know it's it's just like it's
04:22like yeah it was a very valuable piece of advice