Ben Barnes Reveals His Mom’s Advice Helped Him Make His 1st Album

Ben Barnes has seen his music inspire people to sing covers, hug their loved ones and even pole dance.

“An awful lot of pole dancing. I dunno where that comes from, but it was just so great to see people kind of taking the cue from me,” Barnes, 43, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview. “If I can do pop music as a man in his 40s, then people can do the thing that they want to do.”

The actor, known for his roles in The Chronicles of Narnia, Westworld, Shadow & Bone and more, released his full-length album, Where the Light Gets In, earlier this month. The record features stunning vocals, hopeful lyrics and a lot of piano-heavy tracks — which wouldn’t have come together if Barnes hadn’t returned to the keys decades after quitting lessons.

“I had one lesson when I was about 8 and the teacher was a horrible old witch, and she kind of shamed me at the end of the lesson,” he said. “I remember it quite vividly and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going back to doing piano. Piano is stupid.’ I know it’s really important to not have regrets in life and to be really appreciative of everything that’s happened to you that’s led you here. But if I had just gone back the next week…”

It was his mother, Tricia, who inspired him to take up the instrument more than 25 years later amid her own battle with ovarian cancer.

“In my mid-30s again, I actually had a conversation with my mom about priorities and she wasn’t very well at the time and I said, ‘Well, my priorities are to do this and this and this.’ And one of them was to play more music,” Barnes recalled. “She’s very wise, and she said to me, ‘Those aren’t your priorities. Those are ways you’d like to see yourself or those are kinds of dreams you’ve got, but they’re not your priorities. Your priorities are the things you make a priority.’”

His mom’s advice was the push Barnes needed to actually dedicate time to making music. “It really was one conversation,” he said. “It wasn’t even a long conversation, but it just knocked me to the floor and I thought, ‘Right, those things that I want, that I think I want to prioritize, I have to make an effort to put to the top of the list.’ I got a few lessons and I just started spending some time there. And now it’s become really a place of real solace and peace for me. After a day of filming or whatever, just sit at the piano, play some chords. It was a very valuable piece of advice.”

Though he learned the keyboard later in life, Barnes realized he’d been training to be a songwriter for years.

“I would meet even quite established musicians who would be talking me through music structure or chordal stuff or key changes and other things that I didn’t really understand,” he said. “They would then say, ‘Also I’ve written this song, but I’m struggling with the second verse. Do you think you could take a look at the lyrics?’ I was like, ‘Finally this literature degree that I did was becoming useful!’ And so discovering things that you might be sort of naturally good at later in life is a really rewarding thing too.”

His lyrics are positive and hopeful, a sharp contrast from his acting roles in recent years. His single “Beloved” depicts loving someone as they struggle to accept love (“You’re so beloved so be loved,” he sings) while “Slow It Down” feels like a proposal (“Share your baby names with me/Stand at family graves with me”).

The actor doesn’t feel like his dark roles as baddies affect his music, but he conceded, “It was nice to come home from long days of villainy on various TV shows and sit at the piano and write these more sentimental songs. There’s definitely some solace in that.”

Those optimistic lyrics are not a character but a genuine representation of Barnes. “I think that the hopeful aspect to things is just sort of a very intrinsic part of who I am and who I want to be as a man,” Barnes told Us. “I think that sharing that message — that life is short and precious, and we should approach life in a kind of loving and self-loving way — that message manages to creep its way into all of my songs no matter what I set out to write them about. I think that’s just part of who I am.”

Barnes will wrap up the U.S. leg of his tour on Saturday, February 1, in New York City before heading to the U.K. and Europe before returning to play Los Angeles on March 5. Tickets are available here.