Exploring the Quiet Confidence Behind Charlie Barnes’s Solo Work

For Charlie Barnes music has always been both a constant companion and a deeply personal pursuit. From picking up a guitar at 13 to performing alongside Bastille for over a decade, his journey has been defined by a restless curiosity and an unwavering dedication to his craft. In this candid interview, he reflects on the creative shifts that have shaped his solo work, the unexpected joy of stepping back from the pressure of success, and the intimate process behind his latest release, The Heart of Home. What emerges is a portrait of an artist learning to embrace his own musical identity—without the chase.

Your solo work has a very distinct emotional and sonic identity. What themes have been driving your writing lately?

You've, entirely by accident, stumbled on an interesting point for me here. I realised recently that I haven't actually written anything new in over a year (barring a one-off weekend experiment of trying to do the whole co-writing thing everybody's into these days, where really I was just a guy sitting at a computer saying, 'that sounds great!'), so I suppose the true answer is nothing. I started writing songs (unbelievably bad ones, of course) when I first picked up a guitar aged 13, and between then and a year or so ago (I'm 36 now by the way…)

I have never had a gap of more than a few months where I haven't written something. There's definitely been a bit of a shift in me over the last couple of years. Finishing and releasing my last album 'The Heart of the Home' certainly had a feeling of being a line in the sand of sorts. That album is me with a much stronger sense of who I am musically; I've always been chasing that 'definitive work' or whatever, and, although not many people heard it (this isn't me being falsely humble, I release my own music now, I have the numbers), I know, mainly through my engaged and wonderful little patreon community, that the people who heard it are seemingly seeing it as something to be cherished, which feels great. I'm not saying I won't make music any more, but it sort of feels to me like the 'chase' of sorts is over, and whatever I do from here on in might see me allowing myself something of a more care free approach to it all, or whatever. I don't know.

How do you switch creative gears between being a supporting musician live and the primary voice in your solo projects?

I think as the years have gone by, and I've come to accept that my solo endeavours are essentially the work of a semi-glorified hobbyist and not something that I really need to waste an awful lot of time trying to balance psychologically with a very rewarding and creatively fulfilling main job, it's just become something that happens without any major effort. I'm just chipping away, doing my thing whenever I want or need to do my thing. I've long since abandoned any dreams of some sort of breakout success with it all, so the pressure I used to put on my solo work just doesn't really factor into my life any more. This year I did a few solo concerts and it felt so great. I didn't overthink it. I took my guitars, put them through a box so I knew they'd sound good out front, took my keyboard running a nice piano sound, and just played some songs. No panic about trying to create some grand thing with a load of technology and make sure it all sounded enormous, I just stood there and played the songs of mine I like the most.

Do you feel your years of touring have influenced the direction of your solo music?

Undoubtedly, but in different ways as the years have gone by. When I was making the Oceanography album, I definitely wanted to try and bring some of the sound and approach and general world of my work with Bastille into the alternative/progressive/whatever music that my solo project was at the time. It fit with the intention of most of the songs on that album, the bulk of which were written before I'd heard any of Bastille's music let alone played in the band, of trying to do something more accessible. In more recent years though, and with the most recent album in particular, I think it shows that my time working with Bastille has allowed me to really work out what makes me tick musically, or perhaps what I'm good at where music making is concerned. Between the various stripped back acoustic things I've worked on with the band, the couple of songs I've co-produced for them, the MTV Unplugged project I put together for them and Dan's Ampersand album I was a main collaborator on, I think I've managed to hone my approach to making my own music and perhaps rediscover some of the motivations and inspirations I had in my University days that sort of fell by the wayside over the years.

'The Heart of Home' is your latest release, what is it about and what was the process of making it like?

Well, I made it essentially alone, at home. There were a handful of friends involved in it along the way; John Simm from the band Cleft, who also plays percussion in Blossoms, recorded all of the drums at his home studio and e-mailed them over to me, Ben Wall who I made The Society Pages album with recorded various bits and pieces, some remotely, some at his house just before I started the mixing process, my friends Jonny, Barney and Rittipo who've all toured with Bastille added some horn and woodwind parts, some remotely, some with all of us together in Jonny's studio in London, and I had the immense pleasure of spending a couple of days with my friend May in LA recording her phenomenal voice for loads of the songs. The whole thing took four years. I originally intended to just get it done very quickly, stop overthinking everything, all of those good intentions one has, but in the end I started finding what felt like the sound I'd been looking for in my solo work, and so took a much longer time reframing what the album was going to be.

With the world opening back up after the pandemic again, and becoming a Dad along the way, my time to dedicate to the album dropped off dramatically, but I think in a way that was a big help; self-production can be a difficult thing to get right, because it's almost impossible to be able to hear things objectively when you're the one doing pretty much everything. Having some time away from projects, months on end where you don't even think about the songs let alone listen to how the recordings are coming along, can be a very helpful way to have some perspective on things.

As for the subject matter, much of the album is along a coming-of-middle-age sort of theme. The delights of home life, marriage, the anticipation of starting a family, adjusting my relationship with alcohol after a few years of touring the world in what can so easily become an endless party if you let it.

You’ve been part of Bastille’s live lineup for years now. How has your role evolved since you first joined the band?

It's been well over 10 years now, which is a lovely thing. I think when I first started playing with them there was an immediate excitement for all of us about what we could do together, in much the same way as there was with our most recent tour where we introduced two new members of our perpetually rolling cast of characters in Gabi and Alex on percussion and guitar/violin respectively. For me, over the last decade, I've just become more and more deeply involved in various aspects of what the band does. At first it was being part of the creative process for working out stripped back versions of things for radio sessions and the such like, which has always been one of my favourite parts of my work with Bastille, and then more work in the studio started to happen, at first just adding some backing vocals, but eventually taking on a producer role for a couple of tracks. Essentially over the course of 10 quite busy years, I've just picked up more and more responsibilities and been trusted with taking the helm on things more often, the MTV Unplugged thing being the real pinnacle of that.

What’s something fans might be surprised to learn about the behind-the-scenes life of a touring musician?

To be honest, I think in the age that we live in, where it feels like basically everything is being broadcast near enough all the time, I don't feel like there are quite so many things about the life of a touring musician that people would be all that surprised by any more. It feels to me like things are so much more open and less mysterious in the social media age that I don't feel like there's actually anything interesting or insightful I could give about the behind-the-scenes world. The logistics of it all are always the thing that friends and family who come to visit for the day when we're on tour are most interested in. The sheer scale of how these things come together and how many people are involved. For the people on stage, much of the touring life can be sort of hilariously mundane. Lots of waiting around. You have to be careful that you don't end up letting the days slip away. Of course, you always achieve something on a show day; you play some music for people, that's the whole reason you're there in the first place, but the peculiar life of waking up, getting out of a bunk on a tour bus, heading into a building where you likely won't be able to find natural light, where you're able to get everything you need for the day without leaving again, can very easily lead to you not really doing much bar sitting around drinking coffee and just bumbling your way through a series of chats with your various friends in the crew until you all of a sudden realise it's time to get ready to perform.

What does your songwriting process look like, are you someone who writes constantly, or only in focused bursts?

It's been a mixed bag over the years. I think until this unexpected long break I've had from writing anything happened, I generally always had a trickle of ideas happening I would engage with whenever the moment came, I always had something I was working towards. The 'moment' often presents itself as a flurried period of more intense creativity, but I think overall I just sort of lack any kind of discipline to be much of a focused songwriter. These days I can't really shake a sense of embarrassment about the fact that I even bother writing songs anyway; I oscillate so much between intense excitement about making something and wanting to put it out there, and a sort of overwhelming shame that I'm still doing this stuff. It's not as destructive a thing for me as it used to be, I know these days that it all just fundamentally doesn't matter, I'm just another significantly tinier than I thought I was drop in the significantly larger than I thought it was ocean of noise. That a handful of people are paying attention to the things I do is something I feel immensely fortunate for.

Do you have any creative rituals or environments that help you get into a writing mindset?

I probably should, but I don't…

What’s a recent piece of music, yours or someone else’s, that pushed you creatively?

If you're asking about something I've worked on, then I suppose the most recent thing that's proven something of a challenge was a very recent thing I did for my Christmas album that's about to come out. In fact, I suppose in a way this is technically something I've written recently, so the drought it sort of over, in a way. I had the idea a long while ago that it could be interesting, for the Christmas album I've been planning to make for years, to try and re-write 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and make it more universal, calling it 'O Little Town of Anywhere'. I forced myself to just get it done the other week so that I could record it for this Christmas album, and I was very conscious throughout of not wanting to be too corny and on the nose with it (because it is an admittedly corny idea, but I can't help myself), but still have it say what I wanted the song to say in an easily understood way. Hopefully I didn't mess it up…

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Words by Sal F. and photos by Joe H.