Ben Barnes Releases Debut EP At Age 40

‘Westworld’, ‘The Punisher’ ‘Shadow and Bone’ star turned 40 in August and has a newfound 40 year old has just released his first EP of original songs ‘Songs For You’.

Firstly Ben was taken aback by being outted as a 40 year old. “Of God, that is maybe the first time somebody said that to me. 40. Are you sure you got that right? Maybe it is right,” Ben says to Noise11.com.

However, he says his love of music goes back decades and have heavily influenced by his father. “I think when I was 18 or 19 there was nothing but music for me in this world,” he says. “I was doing Sinatra tribute concerts at school and Stevie Wonder Soul nights. I’d sung in a function band and I played drums in a jazz orchestra. Anything vaguely connected to music and I would be there committing my time to it, rummaging through my Dad’s vinyl collection. He had a lot of the best of the 60s and 70s in it which is still the music I love and why I think the EP has such a nostalgic feel to it. Honestly, I think along with the singing and acting I have been doing impressions and odes to the music I love through the years, whether it has been ridiculous parody stadium rock in a movie like ‘Killing Bono’ or Americana folk in the case of Jackie and Ryan. Whatever it is. But it was never purely me, authentically me. At age 40 it just felt time for me to offer up something that was completely from me. Something unadulterated. Something just a raw piece of myself”.

The title ‘Songs For You’ came from the Leon Russell song ‘Song For You’. “It is partly an ode to that song, particularly the Donny Hathaway recording of that song is something I came across quite early, probably when I was 15,” Ben says. “It just cut through to something in me. You can into this state with music as you do which connects with us where you don’t even listen to words. You just feel the music. I always loved how Donny Hathaway’s voice would do that. I loved the poetry of the lyrics in that. I certainly aspire to write lyrics that feel that way and find chords that go along with those feelings. That is part of the reason. The other reason is that I love about music is how someone writes a song about a situation in their life or a feeling that they had and maybe through time and space and history it will connect with someone in their life that they don’t know anything about. It connects us together”.