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Hello, my friend, and welcome back to another edition of Love Someone, my podcast. I have had such a great time this year doing these podcasts. I love talking to people on the air, but when you hear a call on my radio show, it's usually only two or three minutes long, and sometimes people have a lot more to share than we can cram into two or three minutes. And so we decided to do these podcasts so that I could talk to people in depth about things that matter. Now. There are some podcasts that are political in nature, some all about sports, some about cars. There's some really amazing podcast out there. I mean, anything you are interested in, you can find a podcast about. But what we focus on is talking to real people about ways to make a real impact in the world. A lot of times we wait for someone else to fix it. We wait for the county to fix it, or the state to fix it, or the government to fix it, or the church to fix it. We wait for other people to step in and fix huge problems climate change, pollution, animals dying off and becoming extinct, human trafficking something we're going to talk about today. We're waiting for somebody to fix these things. But in reality, we have to be the change that we want to see in the world, we have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone and make a difference, make a difference in our corner of the world. A day in the studio with me as a woman who has been doing that for decades. It's hard to believe, um, but Natasha Beddingfield has been singing and speaking out against human trafficking for a couple of decades now, which is really weird because she's so young and so beautiful and so so sassy. Uh if you if you met her, if you were to meet her, you would think she was probably years old. Um. But she's been around the block three times, maybe four. And today she's going to spend some time talking about her new music, talking about her baby, talking about her family, talking about her brother who was a dear, dear friend, Daniel Beddingfield, and talking about human trafficking. It's a bigger problem than most people know. It's one of those dirty little secrets we don't want to talk about. When people talk about slavery, they talk about slavery in the past tense, But did you know there are more people enslaved today than at any other time in the history of our world. Natasha is going to shed a little light on that. But before we get started in this wonderful conversation, I want to acknowledge the folks at the Home Depot. They make this podcast possible. I appreciate the Home Depot not just as an advocate, but as a devoted customer who loves shopping there. They have everything I need. Everything you need to make your home what you want it to be. If you've got company coming to visit next month for Thanksgiving, now is the time to get your home ready. If that includes new carpeting. The Home Depot has what you need. You'd be amazed at how many choices the Home Depot has and want to choose the style that's right for a room or two or more in your home. You can rely on them as your no hassle carpet installer, and there's free installation if you spend four hundred and nine or more before November six. I've seen them do great work moving furniture, carpeting stairs. They do it all the Home Depot, more saving, more doing. With me in the studio is somebody that I have known from a distance for probably twenty years. Eighteen years. I have seen pictures of you at a hospital bedside when you were nurturing somebody back to health. But this is the first time I met your face to face. That's amazing because you're really great friends with my brother. I yeah, and he loves you. I love your brother like like my own child. I truly with you when I met him, there was such an instant connection. By the way, for those of you, those of you listening to this broadcast, I'm talking with Natasha batting Field. Hi, who's gorgeous. You are just naturally beautiful. And we're going to talk about your new music. We're gonna talk about your old music. We're going to talk about your new baby. We're probably gonna talk about your mom and her ministry and what you do was stopping child trafficking and sex trafficking. We're gonna talk about all of that and my brother. We're going to leave with your brother like it's also a saying, actually had two hits before I did the world two amazing hits and amazing world tour. Daniel Beddingfield, who is one of the most talented human beings I have ever met. Absolutely, I mean I like he like when you see him on stage, he makes so much sense because on stage he's just he is. On off stage, he's a larger than life character. He is he's But did you ever see mozart emadeus when they were saying, just takes that's too busy, take some of those notes out. It's like, I can't take notes out of a song that is created. I can't. I can't be less I am. The song is is what it is. I think I think Daniel is like seeing people. I know white people love to categorize and to contain, to label, to contain. It's impossible to do that with him. It's impossible to do it with anyone, but especially with Daniel exactly. And he was my older brother. That's why I grew up with him, and I grew up just like learning everything off him. He's very generous and he taught me how to sing. And he was a star from the moment he was born. And I knew you were going to be very famous, Natasha, because you I met Daniel he was a teenager. He was not yet to me and you were a kid, and he was saying, he said to me, if you think I'm talented, wait until you hear my little sister. Isn't that that's amazing? And I'm like, yeah, but but you're in the spotlight right now. He goes, I know, I know, I know, but wait until you hear my little sister. That's amazing. That's so beautiful to hear that. Because he he like taught me everything I know. And he was hard on me sometimes, like he like he was like he had to hunderstand it. But that's why, because he saw me as he knew what I was capable love. I think it was it hard. Well, he's I don't know if he's like, but he is. He is a force to be reckoned with for sure. Yeah, he's genius. And uh, and I knew that I was going to love you because just all the lovely things he said. But he shared pictures of you with me for years and he shared your mom with me. That's so cool, isn't that he did? Uh? Daniel was very um kind And when he saw the energy level of my two young children, they were like, you know, five and six or something ridiculous younger than that. They were, you know, in diapers or something. When when we first met and he came to the house, I have the house where my studio is now and I had a trampoline in the yard and he played on that trampoline four hours with my children. Yeah, and he saw that my boys had some unique character traits. He said, please call my mother. She's please call my mother. She's such a good counselor, and she's such an expert, and she helped me to navigate and to avoid um letting the doctors put them on medicine. All of his young life. I never once allowed the doctors you had to put him because because of it in part of your what your mom taught me, and she's sent me literature and had me read books and and learn about, you know, the side effects of the medication to fix a d h D. And I'm like, I'm a d h D. I don't want to fixed. It's what allows me to to juggle my life and live my life. So but your mother is lovely. Thanks, I think, Yeah, and now you're a mom. I'm a mom. I'm and I waited at a while, like I had like full already full career, like I have this married for ten years is and then and then I just had a baby and it's amazing. I don't know why I was waiting so long. So let me ask you this, Natasha Bedingfield, who has had how many hits and great success and you're beautiful? How much more full is your heart, your life, your soul since becoming a mama. I mean, it's it's incredible, It's absolutely incredible. And I also feel so much more in touch with people in general because I know now what people go through and what it takes. And um my, my little son is such a joy. So what's his name? His name is Solomon, and he's almost two. Yeah, he's going to be two in three months, And um, I mean, man, I can't imagine, Like that's a hard thing. Like when you open your heart to love, is that you can lose, something can happen, Like you know, you can lie awake thinking of the terrible things that can happen to a child. You don't want to focus on that stuff, of course, But like I feel like I never, really I didn't want to love somebody that much? Is it terrible? Like I would keep I kept my heart a bit closed because I didn't wants not terrible, It's true. Why would we purposefully set ourselves up to be crushed like that? But that's love, and that's that's the thing is you're not living life if you if you close down. And I think I guess I was living a bit closed down. So for me, now that I've opened up to having this little being in my life who I can't control, I can't predict. I can just love and he you love me. But I feel like there's a new flow in my life. It's it's really interesting, like this just this energy. So tell me how that translates in your music, because now, yeah, so I signed a record deal, I got offered a deal, I left my label UM, and then I got offered this amazing indie deal by Linda Perry UM and we wrote She's Incredible, and the album just came together in such a talk about genius. Just felt like, yes, such a genius too. And the flow was just not try hard. And you as you hear the album, you can hear it's not It just isn't try hard. And a lot of pop music you can get in that zone when you start being safe where you're like, oh, this is a guaranteed hit, like no one can guarantee a hit, but you start kind of writing a bit like that with these kind of executive label people like saying what people want. Have you seen the video it was on YouTube. It's gone around social media where two guys play every song that's been a hit in the last five years and they all sound like the same with the exact same too, And I'm like, whoa, you don't even realize how formula like so formulaic everything has become and it's a set. It's the staying in a safe zone. And I mean, that's just you. You're You're not growing if you kind of do that. So, so tell me about role with me, tell me about some of the songs. Okay, so roll with me. Um, what's fun about this album is it is really fun, but I also got to talk about some of the stuff that really matters to me. Example, so there's a song called Hey Papa, which says, Hey Papa, what's the news? Um, what's going on in the world? This is there's some crazy stuff like every time you wake up in the morning, every time I wake up in the morning, I look at my phone and then I'm like, oh, what bad news am I going to see? As well, like I'm almost afraid to look at my You know, how you unfollow people that I have. I have unfollowed a lot of news feeds that used to come into my phone because I would wake up and then I would be instantly terror terrified or in a negative kind of Not that I don't want to be aware of what's going on, but I can't be inundated every day with negativity. Yeah, and there's there's the first line of song says kids and guns. Starting out so young, we normalize and empathize and then hold our hands over our eyes. So like this, it's like this, there's been so many guns shootings this year. When you hear about so many, it almost desensitizes you and you can end up like just like burying your head under the blankets and just not even doing anything about it. And so um, it's great because I never really talked about stuff like that. Um in my last albums. They were all just about personal like relationships and stuff and fun things. So now that you've been married ten years, yeah, and now I've had a kid and now I care about things more. But I feel like I've got a microphone in front of my face and I have the freedom because I'm an indie label too. Um, and I'm working with someone who also cares about that kind of stuff too, So I just I feel that's quite a release for me because I've definitely had that thing that a lot of women feel and I mustn't be that angry woman or I mustn't be like I mustn't rock the boat. So yeah, it's great. So let's rock a few boats. Yeah, let's rock a few boats and talk about another thing. I know you're passionate about trafficking, human trafficking that racks boats. Yeah, you know why, because we love to celebrate that we are a free society. We love to you know, England and America, that we have democracies and that we we we abolished slavery. But the problem is that a lot of the companies that we buy all our products from am not accountable and they don't check and they and they purposely stay ignorant about the fact that they use a lot of slave labor to make all of their products. And nobody wants to believe that. No, but this is shocking. There's more slavery today than there ever was. When I'm crazy and we celebrate anti slavery, I I go to West Africa at least twice, sometimes three times a year, and um, I go to the slave castles where humans were exported as chattel sixty million over the course of three hundred years. And I see people weeping, I see people crying. I see people going back to the roots and trying to wrap their head around it. And I stand there screaming. But it's going on today. There are more slaves today. There are more people being trafficked today than ever in the history of our world. And then we celebrate things like fourth of July Independence Day, and we talk about the amazing Constitution, and we talk about all these freedoms that we have, while we neglect to pay attention to the fact that thousands of children go missing every year. Tens of thousands of human beings are trafficked, not just across state lines, but country to country. There's a whole network. And when you go up and down the corridors on either coast, there's people every day being trafficked through the truck driving stops. You know they're in they're they're they're enslaved, and we close our eyes and because it's in a different country, but it's not. But it's not you're right, it's not you're right. It's right here too. People can't see it, like people like to focus on the nice and fluffy and like, I'll tell you a funny example my mom, because she found out about that a lot of chocolate companies use slave labor to make the chocolate. And when you talk to them, they're like, they're like, oh, we don't we can't really tell you know, they purposely don't know about it. We outsource our chocolate exactly exactly now we just buy it in bulk the ex so she told us, she told she did a press release instead that our family are all fasting chocolate. Um, well, she didn't check with us, and chocolate happens to be my favorite. And I was like, I'm sorry, mom, I'm not fasting chocolate. Pick another, Pick another food. There are chocolates though you can find there are there are fair trade, fair trade chocolate, so the delicious, especially dark. But this is why it's so hot. It's because we love. We love, you know, we love. We don't want to know that our soccer balls that our kids are kicking around were sown by four year olds. We don't want to know exactly that the genes that you're wearing are sown by men. And women imprisoned for not violent crimes, and they're making since an hour too to make the genes that you're wearing. We don't want to think about that, but I don't make you think about it right now. I don't. I truly don't want to think about it. No, I know I don't, but it's true. Oh it's it's such a horrific, pervasive problem, and nobody wants to talk about them. But you're you and your mom and brother and my brother. And there's a company that I've been um so the name of the ministry that well, my mom's ministry is called it's it's a charity called Global Angels, but she works very closely with Stop the Traffic. And then there's another one, UM a guy called Justin Dillon, and his charity is called Freedom f R d M, Freedom the Vows, And what he does is he works on talking with companies to keep them accountable because the companies have realized, oh my gosh, we are going to be in trouble when people figure it caeple to figure out. And it's just like the organic food, like if there's enough demand for something, then suddenly you see a whole aisle full of organic food and so his thinking is, look, if companies could know like that this is important to people, that's where our power is, you know, because these companies are just doing what they think people will accept. I I talked to um my friend who runs the charity Freedom that I mentioned, and he said that, like, we did a documentary together called Call in Response, and we were this is about ten years ago and we were talking about this issue because nobody knew about it ten years ago. There's definitely a lot more awareness. But what he said is that in England and in Australia, there was a law passed that makes companies have to be responsible for what at least on with this level with you know, with companies, at least they have to be responsible for the people who work for them into making their products so that they're paid a fair wage. Yes, so it's an act that was passed that makes it legal that they have to. So that's just good news because we are making progress and that pressure from the public does actually work. And so that's the kind of stuff that we need to see happen in America. And I think that one of the things that you know, people are strung lieing so hard. Everyone listening here, we all have our own issues that we're dealing with, not to mention, let's talk about all the stuff that's happening in other people's lives, but also our own lives. I think it's sometimes we just get overwhelmed and people feel apathetic, like my voice doesn't count. So something that's important to me is that people that my music would encourage people to feel like their voice counts, and that you should. We all need to get involved. And we are in a democracy, and basically people love to take people's power away and to make you feel like you're just nothing and that you just don't have a voice. But we do have a voice, and so the more active we get, the more can change can happen. Amen. Amen to that. So we're bouncing around here, but let's get back to roll with Me. I love it, Thank you. Let's bring it back to my album. Yeah, bring it back to your album because I want to learn more. I want to hear more about some of the singles that we're going to be hearing from there. Thank you, Yeah, Okay, roll with me? How did it get its name? Um? I wrote a song called roller Skate with Linda Perry and it's about just being in London growing up and roller skating. We talked about all these you know, like big world life changing things that terrible, but it is just great to have music that makes you feel good. And one of the things that I loved being in London was roller skating growing up with my brother who we've talked about, Daniel, and he would be roller skating and I'd be trying to catch up with him, and um, it's great. It's find no way to catch up with your brother. He's he is, he's larger than life. I can never catch up with him. No, not on roller skates unless you you know, had roller skates that had like a jet pack on the side. That he might say that I'm amazing. He's like that I'm in better than him, but it's not true. He's actually the most talented person I've ever met. Have you seen those jet ski things, those jet packs that you can ride above water on. Yes, funny enough. My sister wrote, um, there's a there's a whole commercial with those in them that she wrote the theme tune too. Really, it's write it. My sister is also, i have to say, also the best songwriter and singer in the world. So wait till you have That's what Daniel said about you. Now, your sister Nicola, Yeah, just like your folks just have like major talent DNA. Yeah. I don't know what was going on with my brother. Also, I have two brother and a sister who are both incredible singers. But I think that if you have, if you kids need creative stuff, if kids have access to learning how to do like music, if kids are brought up around music, then I think that all kids are musical. Everyone is. After raising as as I raised, I can tell you that is not true. Oh yeah, several of my children are very, very musical, and some are theatrical, and some have the dance gene and can dance like rhythm, rhythm, rhythm, and some aren't. And there's a verse that says, trying up a child in the way they should go, and they are old, they will not depart from it. And most people take that to me, train up a child in a church or in a particular religion, and I agree with that. I think that you need to give your children a firm foundation kindness, kindness and morals, and a moral compass and saying. But I also think it means train up a child in the way they should go. They individual, They every I believe every child has gifts that are unique to them in different measures and different combinations. And my one of my most important jobs as a parent is to find what that is and then train them up in it so that when they are old, they will be true to to who they were meant to be. And some parents, you know, say you're going to be a lawyer, or you need to be a doctor. But if you see it in your son a passion for music, I know you're going to sign him up for drum lessons or guitar lessons or piano lessons, or if you see you're right. A lot of people try and actually like their kids. They try and give me the opportunities they never had. It's like, well, you know, like they never got to go to college. They're like, you will go to college, or you you are going to be a football player, or yeah, yeah, I think that's important not to do that. But if you see that your son loves to kick a soccer ball around exactly, yeah, then it's your responsibility to make sure they have their fair trade soccer ball that it gets on the field. Uh, and learns how to kick a soccer ball. So so, speaking of kick it, tell me about like that we've been kicking it with you before any of the radio station. I might I might add that it is true I kick it. Um, that's that's the single. It's like not even a typical pop song. It's it's definitely like but this something about it that it's just got this energy and it's talking about making a relationship last. Um, how do you do it? You do? What do you do it? You've done? Kick it has a few meetings. We we actually google kick it because it's kind of a cool word and it means hanging out exactly, but it also means like letting go of stuff literally kicking, yeah, exactly, or kicking a football. But like my husband, he was great, he said, actually, yeah, you know you when you when you make a relationship last, you have to do the things that are fun that you used to do. You have to hang out with each other's put the time in keep falling in love. Especially is it hard to to to date your husband? Really? Is? There's a book called What's it called? And Baby Makes Three which is actually kind of awesome, and it talks about how like you have to keep your relationship strong as well, because that's important for your kid. It's so sweet. Oh my gosh. Like I was away from my husband for a week with my son. He was touring with me in Germany, and when we got back, um all together, Like we're lying in bed, he's lying in between us, and he was like Mama, dada moment Like he was like he went, he was so excited. He's only got a few words, but he was so excited about the fact that we were all to get all together and he was relishing that. Natasha hold that thought as we hear from one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. Welcome back to Love Someone with Delilah. Today, we're talking with Natasha Bettingfield and we continue our conversation now. So when you had your child, did you suddenly understand your mom a lot more? I did. I did, And I felt so much grace up and so much gratefulness, and also just thought about single mothers and how like just incredible women are and how incredible bodies are. And I felt more love for my body and acceptance. And I called my mom when my son was about a week old. Did you and I said thank you, he said for what I said, for everything. I had no idea how much you loved me until now. And I also I'm also like say, I just say thank you to my son, like I like that he I love the idea that he chose me maybe somehow, like he chose me as his mom or God chose me as his mom. But I, um, God love the whole world. Yeah, and I just I just want to have gratitude, even if I feel anxiety or like that I might mess up as a mom or whatever. I just try and be grateful of like thank you for each moment, and I will I know. Well, one of the songs actually on the album is called King of the World, and it's actually saying that around my son. I feel like I'm king of the world. Like I feel like he sees me right now in that infant stage. He sees me as like enjoy it because fourteen fifteen years old, all of a sudden you become a big dummy head. I know. And I've got friends who have teenagers, so I like, hear all those stories and I'm like somebody told me, like you know, there's so much cynical stuff, but like basically your job is apparently you're just letting them down slowly. But infe you've got all this, Natasha bedding Field. You've got all these videos, You've got all this history. You've filled stadiums, your brother's filled stadiums. I'm sure your sister's building stadiums. You've got thousands of followers. I'm sure on social media. But when your kid hits fourteen or fifteen, you will not be cool. It's crazy, that's that's and you'll get mom and it becomes like a three syllable word moms them mom, Like what yesterday I was your superhero king of the world. That's why I like, I'm like, I say to my husband, I'm like, give you mom a cuddle right now, Like tell her something nice. Yea. Natasha bedding Field, thank you for spending this time here in the studio with me. I know that your music is available everywhere. I am glad you're back in the studio. I'm glad you're recording again. But I'm really really glad that God is blessing you and your husband and your baby and your life. Thank you for coming and spending time here. I love someone with the lima