12 INTERVIEWS OF XMAS: Leon Bridges - ""Van Morrison is one of my favourite musicians"

Originally published in Hot Press in October 2024:

Genre hopping powerhouse Leon Bridges possesses a glittering CV: Grammy winner; billions of Spotify streams; performing at the White House for Barack Obama; and collaborating with big kahunas like Luke Combs, John Mayer and Kacey Musgraves. At times, he sounds as close to Sam Cooke as is humanly possible, and dresses better than most anyone in the game – and yet, he is a reluctant interviewee.

Not reluctant, I stress, in a rude manner - he is polite, warm, affable – but the guy is just shy. I’m told so by his record company, when explaining their interest in the intended line of questioning. I provide assurances that we’ll be chatting music, music, music; that it will simply be a chat between a Texan and an Irishman. And thankfully, that’s exactly how things pan out.

Leon is in London, in advance of a gig at the Earth Theatre in Dalston, an intimate venue in a converted 1930s cinema, where I once caught a blasting Mdou Moctar concert, promoting his 2021 record Afrique Victime. Leon not being familiar with Moctar, I pitch him as a phenomenal Tuareg musician who plays guitar like Eddie Van Halen. Leon likes the description, saying he digs Tinariwen, the Tuareg collective who pioneered the desert blues.

I sense Leon relaxing a tad; we’re just two guys chatting music, and when we get into his current album, Leon, he leans in and unwinds. The record is Bridges’ most personal to date, doused as it is in the Texas of his childhood and teenage years. Current single ‘Laredo’ cruises the border town after dark, while ‘Panther City’ evokes the corner stores and front porches of his hometown of Fort Worth.

It’s a song about swapping tapes, playing Nintendo 64, long summer days and the first taste of love. It’s the sweet sound of home, right?

“Totally,” Leon grins. “Fort Worth, it’s home. I was born in Atlanta, but my parents moved there when I was a baby. It’s a cool city, it’s unique. It’s got this small town, big city feeling. In Texas, that’s where the Bible Belt is, and in black culture specifically, the thing is to go to church, and we pretty much went to church every Sunday.”

Leon pauses in the memory, momentarily losing his train of thought. I wonder was he in the choir, and his answer surprises me.

“I never really got into the choir,” Leon replies. “I didn’t start really pursuing music till I got older. But I always loved music, always loved to sing along to my favourite songs growing up.”

Fort Worth is often overshadowed by its big sister Dallas. When I ask Leon about the difference between the two, he tells me that Dallas looks more to LA and New York for direction, while Fort Worth “takes pride in our western heritage. It’s very slow paced. The people are the salt of the earth, which is why I love living there. It’s really disconnected from all the chaos and craziness.”

When I ask Leon why Fort Worth is called Panther City, he smiles.

“It goes back to the 1800s,” he explains. “There was a guy who had visited Fort Worth from Dallas, and as an insult, he was saying that Fort Worth was so sleepy, you could see a panther just chilling on the streets. That’s how it got the moniker.”

Leon’s home state certainly has a storied musical history. From the Tejano style of fusion music and the Western Swing of Ernest Tubb and Lefty Frizzell; through the early rock and roll of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison; the Outlaw Country of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson; and the southern blues of Johnny Winter, ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan – Texas has always been a sonic melting pot.

Let’s just say, with Leon, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. His sophomore album Good Thing channelled funk, disco and jazz, and he collaborated with psych-funk trio Khruangbin on a pair of EPs, Texas Sun and Texas Moon. 2021’s Gold-Diggers Sound, meanwhile, is a modern R&B-soul album, with the current album maintaining that trajectory.

“We’ve been working on this album since 2018,” says Leon. “I really tried to shake a lot of these songs, or just kind of put it on the back burner, because they didn’t make sense at the time. But these songs really kept haunting me, and my intuition was telling me that I really needed to revisit these tunes.”

The initial sessions took place in Nashville, but when Leon revisited the material, it was decided to decamp to El Desierto Recording Studio in Mexico City.

“That’s where we reimagined everything,” he says. “I feel like all my music has been transparent and honest, but I think I’ve always struggled to be vulnerable in my music. I wanted to give listeners a closer look into who I am. What I wanted people to take from this album was to get back to what is really meaningful to you.”

It certainly achieves that. Childhood reminiscences on ‘Panther City’ extend into the smell of home-cooked gumbo on ‘Simplify’. The perils and joys of adolescence and young manhood are evoked on ‘That’s What I Love’ and ‘Laredo’. The former takes place along the banks of the Trinity River in Fort Worth, while the latter plays out along the legendary Rio Grande and the border town of Laredo.

“I used to dance in college,” says Leon. “There was a dance competition in Laredo, but I didn’t really get to experience much of the city. The song is about what would have transpired if I had more time. Shout out to South Texas! We really wanted that sonic energy you get south of the border.”

The Latin influences and downtempo vibe on ‘Laredo’ evoke the topography of the Rio Grande and the cultural hybrid of towns along the US-Mexico border. I suggest that it all makes for the most contemporary record in Leon’s catalogue.

“It’s an amalgamation of all my projects,” he says. “I went on a journey, I started doing the ‘50s and ‘60s thing, and that was honest at that time. I wanted to branch out and experiment with R&B, and then I worked with Khruangbin, and all those experiences led to this album. I love it. It’s very organic, but still pushes the envelope.”

Listening to ‘That’s What I Love’, especially its jazz-soul coda, I could hear Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison. I wonder is Leon a fan?

“Absolutely!” he chuckles. “That’s crazy! I mean my pantheon is Bobby Womack, and Van Morrison’s in there, and I would probably put Usher there. But Van Morrison is one of my favourite musicians. And yeah, there’s some Van Morrison moments on this album.”

Something else that Leon shares with Van’s work is the ability to evoke specific places. It is an album that echoes the I-35 from Fort Worth through Waco, Austin and San Antonio, finally terminating in Laredo.

“I didn’t go into this album knowing exactly what the concept was,” says Leon. “I guess it was more a case of almost hitting a wall creatively at that time. And I thought, ‘Just write about home.’ And so, a lot of the songs seem to have those themes, of reminiscing on childhood. And yeah, those places and people that really shaped me.”

The mid-section of the record contains the instrumental ‘Teddy’s Tune’, simply consisting of acoustic guitar amid soothing birdsong. I wonder is the track an interlude for flipping the vinyl, from side A to side B.

“Man, yeah,” Leon agrees. “It’s like the intermission moment. I love it, because there’s a lot of little guitar diddlies that I’m always messing around with. And when I was in Mexico, I was just messing and playing that song, and the band said, ‘Yo, that’s rad, let’s track it!’ And it’s cool that it ended up on the album. I’ve never really done anything like that before, so it’s kind of special.”

Who’s the band?

“It’s a new crew,” says Leon. “Shout out to Ian Fitzchuk, I discovered him through Kasey Musgraves. I was really a fan of how her record sounded and that’s kind of what brought us together. And he facilitated the crew. He enlisted Nick Bockrath from Cage The Elephant, and Josh Moore – he’s Ian’s right-hand man.

“Then there was my good friend Conrad, and I also brought my friend Brandon Marcel from Fort Worth. It was cool, we definitely had a brotherhood, and lot of that played into this album being great. It was us bringing all our different talents together.”

Leon is out now.