Louis Tomlinson is slowly but surely getting back to business.

A month after losing his mother, Johannah Deakin, to leukemia, the 25-year-old has opened up about the loss and how it’s affected his music.

“It's not something that I feel 100 percent comfortable talking too much about, but just quickly, when I first found out the news I kind of did want to throw the towel in,” he admitted in a new interview with Sirius XM. “But it was my mum who said to me that I've just got to keep going. She told me very sternly that she wanted me to.”

Just days after his mom’s death, Tomlinson performed his debut solo song — the Steve Aoki—featuring “Just Hold On” — on The X Factor U.K. “It was tough,” he said about the performance, “but I felt like it was nice for me to almost have a little send-off for her.”

As for the rest of Tomlinson’s family life, he says he’s enjoying being a dad to son Freddie Reign, who will celebrate his first birthday on Saturday (January 21).

“It’s affected how I am as a person a little bit,” Tomlinson said about being a dad, adding that he “definitely” wants more kids in the future. “I’d like to say it’s made me a bit more mature — I don’t know if that’s actually true.”

It might be true ... after all, in the same interview, he spoke about mending his relationship with former 1D bandmate Zayn Malik. The two had a public falling out after Zayn left the group in March 2015, but Louis says they’ve since (very maturely) patched things up.

“I think a lot of us have spoken recently, me and Zayn have spoken recently, gotten to a point now where you can just really be happy for each other. Things have happened in the past, of course,” he said, adding that hearing Z’s solo music is a “strange feeling but it’s nice. His first song was an absolute smash, and that’s a great song.”

If that’s not a mature response, then I don’t know what is.