Leon Bridges Good Thing Album

[Justina Ky]

Bridgesvocals dance atop a bouncy bass line on "Bad Bad News" with unruly horns and tell a story of triumph. "They tell me I was born to lose / But I made a good good thing out of bad bad news," he sings.

The 28-year-old soul singer first found mainstream success in 2015 with his hit single, "Coming Home" and debut album of the same name. He's said in the past that he never intended to write soul music, but his connection to Golden Era gospel and silky, vintage tone suggest otherwise.

Though Bridges has drawn comparisons to Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke, the millennial artist has spent his time in between albums making surprising collaborations with those outside of his designated genre. Bridges has toured with pop dreamboat Harry Styles and has been featured on tracks with rapper Lecrae and EDM duo ODESZA.

Every ticket purchased online includes 1 CD copy of the forthcoming album Good Thing. Fans who redeem the album will also have the option to upgrade their CD to a standard LP edition. Fans can also visit leonbridges.com for additional information as well as all Leon Bridges related news and information.

Amid a growing number of soul, funk and R&B bands revitalizing the sounds of the '60s and '70s, a 20-something singer from Fort Worth, Texas, came on the scene and stole the show with his smooth sound and vintage aesthetic. Leon Bridges won over mainstream audiences with his 2015 album Coming Home, a record so rife with earnest, pleading soul that he easily garnered comparisons to Sam Cooke as well as an invitation to perform for the Obamas at the White House.

Yet Bridges, a typically soft-spoken soul with just a hint of a Texan accent, is no revival act and is out to prove it on his forthcoming album. Good Thing, available May 4, is a multi-genre musical leap that holds true to his musical influences without forsaking the mid-century soul that first garnered him fame.

"Going into this next record, I didn't want to stay complacent and continue to make that sound for the rest of my career," Bridges told Newsweek. "We were able to pool from different eras of R&B. It's still the same language in a way, but...I wanted to take the integrity of what I started and making the songs bigger and bolder."

For all the early comparisons to famed singer Sam Cooke, Bridges didn't grow up listening to much soul music. A trained dancer, he liked Ginuwine and Usher; their influence comes out in force on Good Thing. The album's first single, "Bad Bad News," is a pop-funk club hit in the vein of Bruno Mars while "Shy" evokes '90s era R&B over a simple guitar riff.

Where Coming Home primarily stayed in one musical lane, Good Thing is much more wide-ranging. The album is bookended by love songs and dedications in falsetto that one might expect from Bridges' early work, though the majority of its 10 tracks are nods to the many ways soul music influences and is influenced by other genres. You'll hear hints of Michael Jackson on "Lions," mainstream pop on "If It Feels Right Then It Must Be" and an eclectic mix of Stax Records and country on "Beyond."

Despite its wider appeal, there was some concern about alienating Bridges' early fans, who perhaps have come to see him as a torchbearer for a new generation of traditional soul music. Yet like many black artists who find themselves with a largely white fan base, Bridges had to confront possibly alienating people of color. A NPR article from 2015 questioned whether America needed Bridges' "feel-good vintage nostalgia" and criticized the lack of people of color in the video for "Coming Home," in which Bridges has a white lover.

"Yeah, when I sing 'Brown-Skinned Girls,' I always say, 'Where my brown-skinned girls at,' and there'll be like maybe seven or eight of them girls in the crowd," Bridges told Vogue in 2015. "But I think a lot of black people aren't as aware of my music yet."

Certainly, people of color listen to and enjoy Bridges' brand of soul revivalism, which also channels gospel and hints of country twang. However his second album, which was recorded over two months in Los Angeles under the direction of Grammy-nominated executive producer Ricky Reed, was developed with a larger audience in mind.

The new musical direction on Coming Home is also a result of collaborations between Bridges and other artists, including a soaring single with Seattle-based electro-pop duo Odesza, a soulful appearance on the cautionary Macklemore-Ryan Lewis track "Kevin" and a duo with Texas Christian rapper Lecrae on an album inspired by the film Birth of a Nation. Bridges met producer Reed while working with Detroit artist Dej Loaf, and the two challenged him as a songwriter and a singer.

"Writing [for Coming Home] was very restrictive," Bridges noted. "Songs like 'Bet Ain't Worth The Hand,' I've never written a falsetto or sang in that range on any of my previous projects. 'Georgia to Texas' is a super experimental R&B vibe." "Georgia to Texas," the album's closing track, might be the most direct link to Leon Bridges' early work. Much like "River," the gospel-tinged closer on Coming Home, "Georgia" is a wistful and heartfelt tribute to Bridges' past and family.

"It's a great story of my mother being a New Orleans native, and me being born in Atlanta, and moving to Texas, then growing up and finding my love within music," he said. "It was important to really keep the integrity of what people loved with my first album and I feel like 'Georgia' really reflects my life."

Although Good Thing is a move away from the sounds that brought him fame and leans into the mainstream, Bridges' dedication to the universality of soul music and its evolution is anything but bad, bad news.

The right chemistry between a producer and artist can create magic. Music history is often written by great artist/producer pairings -- George Martin and the Beatles, Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash at the end of Cash's life, Brian Eno and U2, just to name a few.

Grammy winner Leon Bridges, who took home a trophy this year for Best Traditional R&B Performance for "Bet Ain't Worth The Hand," one of his four nominations, found some production magic teaming with 2016 Grammy Producer Of The Year nominee Ricky Reed (Kesha, Halsey, Twenty One Pilots).

To get a better understanding of the producer and artist dynamic I spoke with Bridges and Reed about their work on Good Thing, how they bonded over Ginuwine and '90s R&B and the one song each wishes they had written.

Ricky Reed: Definitely one of the first we realized that we had a mutual appreciation for and just the whole era of music was the Ginuwine era of mid-'90s R&B. Wouldn't you say, Leon, that was one of the first things where we were like, "Oh s**t, you like that too?"

Bridges: Honestly I was reluctant to collaborate cause I got comfortable working with my guys at Niles City Sound and I was like, "Oh yeah, Ricky's done some pop stuff. I don't know if this is gonna work." But I was open to try it out and so with me, what I loved about Ricky, he had some really dope ideas and some really awesome sounds. So, for me, it was like, "How can I juxtapose this modern R&B thing with my twang soulful delivery?"

Reed: And I think it's really just the other side of the same coin with me. I never had a singer like Leon in my studio in my whole life and it was immediately apparent anything he sings sounds great, anything. Then it was a matter of where we can challenge ourselves. How do you challenge one of the greatest modern singers to push himself into places he hasn't explored yet? For me, a lot of it was getting over the awe of his voice and being alright, "How do we challenge ourselves both with different parts of the voice and different kinds of melodies and even starting to explore different lyrical territory?" With a voice like Leon's it was one of the most fun things I've ever done.

Bridges: For me, I didn't want to sing a falsetto or sing in that range. And Ricky pushed me to hit the vocals and I was able to execute it surprisingly. For sure, that's definitely the biggest for me.

Reed: On my side of it we wrote a lot of the music for this album in the craziest spur of the moment almost improvisational way. Me, Leon, Nate [Mercereau] a lot of the time, some great songwriters and we would just come in and be like, "Alright, here's a little starter instrumental." And we would all just riff and sometimes you'd hit a vocal and you could write a whole song in two hours. Like "Bad, Bad News," "Lions," a couple of songs that we were just vibing and we didn't really look back. We laid it all down free-styling, Leon would just hit something that feels good, sounds good and we wouldn't think twice. Definitely now when I look back on the process of that I try to bring that a lot of other sessions I do now. But the thing is you never know if you're gonna have the success the way you do when the drew is so right. Because our crew on the Good Thing album, look back on it now and it's like, "How did we assemble such an all-star cast of creative's?" There were just so many amazing people around us.

Bridges: Definitely, and even in the process prior to us working together, my songwriting process would take months. I usually start something and never finish a song so it was really awesome to see how seasoned songwriters would toss ideas and how to piece songs together in a short amount of time.

Reed: The first thing that comes to mind when you think of that, yeah, George Martin and the Beatles, Michael [Jackson] and Quincy [Jones]. For me, Rick Rubin is definitely a hero of mine and the way he knows how to get people to focus on what's important in the song, the emotional core of it, is my favorite style of production, essentially just challenging people to be the best they can be. And to focus on the right things, I think that's where the magic of that relationship is. What do you think, Leon?

Bridges: Yeah, man. A current relationship for sure that I really love is the recent Usher Zaytoven collab. For a minute, Usher went pop, but I love how Usher brought it back home to what we loved in 8701 and Confessions and all that kind of stuff.

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