Nostalgia has always made for a fairly precarious environment for musicians. In the dictionary, the word is only a few pages removed from ‘novelty’ and so too are acts that trade on nostalgia. There’s a right way to go about things and a wrong way to go about things.
What’s more, the more we fall in love with nostalgia (BuzzFeed just can’t seem to stop publishing lists geared towards “90s kids”) the harder it seemingly is to actually pretend you’re anywhere but the here and now. Consequence of Sound‘s Adam Kivel recently noted the same thing.
Kivel was gearing up to attend a performance by Leon Bridges, a swiftly up-and-coming young soul singer from Fort Worth, Texas, who’d nabbed the 2015 Grulke Prize for Excellence at SXSW. Bridges was playing at Chicago’s Green Mill, an iconic jazz club beloved by the likes of Al Capone.
Considering the setting and Bridges’ retro soul style, Kivel felt like donning his best suit and tie — dressing to the nines, as they say — and entering the club like Cary Grant into the hearts of young female filmgoers.
But it’s 2015, and the venue would assuredly be filled with the blue aura of mobile phones, as hoards of punters take selfies to upload to Instagram and film the majority of the performance in order to stash it on YouTube, where the footage will never be watched again.
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It’s becoming harder and harder to be a convincing throwback, especially when we’re talking about a time so awash in sepia-tinted romanticism as the ’50s and ’60s, which birthed some of the most revered artists in popular music.
Not only is the world we live in so decidedly un-romantic, but an artist runs the risk of becoming quaint and irrelevant by thinking the world around them is anything but what it is – more interested in Instagram and YouTube than slow-dancing and moonlight.
But raised on Usher and Ginuwine, and not discovering ’50s and ’60s soul until he was already singing and writing music, Leon Bridges doesn’t feel like a nostalgia act.
His press shots are reminiscent of classic shots of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and the production on his full-length debut, Coming Home, is retro to the bone, but Leon Bridges isn’t going for nostalgia, he’s all about tradition.
“I’m not saying I can hold a candle to any soul musician from the ’50s and ’60s,” Bridges says, “but I want to carry the torch.” It’s his insistence on torch-carrying instead of trying to simply bask in the light of his musical ancestors that separates Leon Bridges from the pack.
The result is an album of emulation rather than imitation. The songs are charmingly simple and while tunes such as ‘Lisa Sawyer’ or ‘Better Man’ contain the occasional lyrical misstep, it’s never enough to derail the song or the album.
Bridges would do well to check his sentimentality, but he’s succeeded in crafting an album of well-crafted and sweetly sung soul music that begs repeated listens. Between the doo-wops of ‘Better Man’ and the vinyl crackle of the title track, Coming Home can often feel like a long-lost collection of soul singles.
It will be interesting to see the trajectory Bridges’ career takes, whether we’ll see the Usher and Ginuwine influences creep up on later records, but for now, Leon Bridges is providing soul fans with the perfect conduit to revel in an important musical tradition.
