Leon Bridges has never had a hit song.
That’s not to say he’s not successful, or that there isn’t an audience for his brand of soulful pop. His debut album was certified platinum, while its follow-up went gold. He was nominated for four Grammys between 2016 and 2019, winning one (Best Traditional R&B Performance, for his “Bet Ain’t Worth the Hand”). Texas Sun and Texas Moon, his two widely adored collaborative EPs with Houston’s Khruangbin, have been dorm-room staples since they were released in 2020 and 2022, respectively. One of the most sought-after voices in music, Bridges has been tapped for collaborations by everyone from Bun B and Gunna to Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves.
Still, he’s just not the kind of artist who gets a whole lot of radio play. Since the dawn of digital music, there’s been a lot of noise made about the death of the album, but more than a decade into the Spotify era, Bridges very much remains an album-oriented artist. That—along with the honey-coated voice that recalls Sam Cooke, and Bridges’s affinity for styling himself in vintage clothes—has led Bridges to be branded largely as a nostalgia act; search for his name with the word “throwback” on Google, and you’ll get 26 pages of results. But on Leon—his fourth album, out today—the wistful fondness for the past is more personal and less pastiche.
That’s because the Fort Worth native’s record is Texas as hell. Song titles include “Laredo” and “Panther City,” a reference to Bridges’s hometown. On the groove-heavy “That’s What I Love,” Bridges includes “springtime on the Trinity River” and “Texas summer nights” on the list. On the silky-smooth love song “Ain’t Got Nothin’ On You,” he rhymes the song’s title with “Texas barbecue.” The ethereal piano ballad “Simplify” has Bridges yearning once more for the banks of the Trinity as he pines for his first love, a “girl from Corpus town.” Bridges has always been a Texas artist, but on Leon, he centers his identity on his home state.
It’s fitting, then, that Bridges is spending a lot of time around the album’s release performing in Texas. On three nights leading up to Leon’s October 4 release, he gave audiences their first extended look at the record in a series of surprise club dates at Austin’s two-hundred-person Continental Club, with tickets available only to those who showed up in person, cash in hand. Today he’ll play during a prestigious time slot on one of the Austin City Limits Festival’s main stages, warming up the crowd just before Chris Stapleton’s headlining set. From there, he’s got a week of dates around the state—visiting some of our less-traveled spots, including El Paso, Lubbock, and San Antonio—before returning to Austin for the second weekend of the festival and then setting off on another five weeks’ worth of dates.
The songs Bridges will bring to venues such as Berkeley, California’s Greek Theatre (already sold out), New York’s Beacon Theatre (two nights of a three-night stand sold out), and Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium (another three-night stand) may be Texas-centric, but the focus on a sense of place makes them universal. Everybody’s from somewhere, after all. It’s easier for listeners to connect Bridges’s fondness for the Trinity to whatever body of water they spent their own childhoods around than it is for them to connect with vague lines like, say, the chorus to 2015’s “Coming Home” (“Wanna be around / Wanna be around, girl”) or the abstract “Take me to your river / I wanna go,” from that year’s “River.” (Rivers have long been a theme in Bridges’s work.)
Even as Bridges has climbed the ladder to something approaching genuine stardom, he’s lamented being labeled a retro act. Almost since the beginning, he has sought to prove that he’s more than just a “we have Otis Redding at home” gimmick. That image worked to his benefit back in 2015—his well-documented overnight transition from dishwasher to star probably wouldn’t have happened if the easy hook of “young retro-soul man” hadn’t been so readily available to the critics, booking agents, and publicists who helped make that transition happen—and there’s no denying that a song like that year’s “Coming Home” is built around a sock hop vibe crafted to appeal to listeners who want the same thing their parents or grandparents listened to in a contemporary package.
Bridges told Texas Monthly in 2021 that he responded to the reception from the white hipster audience that gravitated to his early sound by deciding, “I’m not going to be fulfilling your wet dreams of having a soul revivalist man. I’m way more than this.” But even as he began exploring new sounds on the immediate follow-up to Coming Home, Good Thing, and especially on his more contemporary-sounding third album, Gold-Diggers Sound, the songs themselves still kept listeners at a distance. Despite Bridges being an album-oriented artist, the records weren’t exactly thematically cohesive. The closest most of Bridges’s earlier work came to having a theme was that he sang a lot of boilerplate love and breakup songs.
On Leon, though, Bridges seems to believe in what he’s singing about. It’s all the Texas in his music, yeah, but focusing so much on place has brought out something else in him. He’s embraced specificity—you’ve never heard someone sing the words “play Nintendo 64” with such passion before—and because of that, he’s written the most memorable batch of songs of his career. Bridges’s music has always been a vibe; now it’s also about something.
If nostalgia is what it’s about, well, that’s long been a big part of what Bridges does. But there’s a big difference between being nostalgic for, like, the sixties and an age gone by and reminiscing about the sights, sounds, and sensations of a Texas childhood. On Leon, Bridges hasn’t just moved on from being perceived as a soul revivalist man—he’s also moved into something else. He’s more real, more authentic, and more unique than he’s ever been. If he’s got that going for him, then who needs a hit song?
