The Gold-Diggers is a Los Angeles hotel that is both a speakeasy and a recording studio. In other words, “the paradise of any musician”, in the words of one of the paladins of the new soul, Leon Bridges (Atlanta, United States, 32 years old). He knows what he’s talking about. He has spent the last two years staying there reinventing, night after night, a sound he wanted to take as far as possible. “We wanted to find a new frontier for the rhythm & blues, give us all the freedom in the world to unlock something new, “he says in a video call. He has already returned to Fort Worth (Texas), the city where he grew up, and where he worked as a dishwasher until someone, a talent scout, saw him perform one night in one of those open mic venues, where they get on stage fans. Two years later, he was playing at the White House.
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Gold-Diggers Sound (“The sound of the gold diggers”, released on July 23) is the title of his third album, the one that was composed during those long nights – “we finished our tequilas at 10 in the morning and got up with a coffee at 10 at night,” he recalls— in the building of the same name. “My favorite musicians” would pass by and we would simply “improvise” on a lot of sketches of themes that have given rise to an eclectic album in which soul expands to play jazz and “a good part of the classic sound of black music “, Although without ceasing to dialogue” with the present. ” The letters? “Well, it’s the album where I am most vulnerable. I talk about my insecurities, my little struggles, lost loves ”, he reveals.
The loneliness of success is very rare. Because there are all those people who love you and follow you, but you are alone in your hotel room and you miss your life
He is sparing in the answers. He doesn’t like fame, he says. It is the worst of the six years he has been in the arena. He won a Grammy in 2019 for one of the songs on Good Thing, his second album, and since then he has published songs with all kinds of artists – from John Mayer to Kacey Musgraves to Noah Cyrus – he has opened for Harry Styles and has played Gil Scott-Heron in the film First Man, by Damien Chazelle. “But I’ve also felt very lonely,” he says. The topic Blue Tables, with the one who closes the album, talks about it. “Fame takes you away from everything. The loneliness of success is very rare. Because there are all those people who love you and follow you, but you are alone in your hotel room and you miss your life, “he explains.
Although things have changed. In these two years he has reconciled with the person that fame has made him. He has seen the possibilities to be at the top. Like staying at the Gold-Diggers and giving yourself all the time in the world to shape something different that at the same time has a vindictive touch. “The rhythm & blues dying in the black community. Blues and soul are dying genres among musicians of color. If you go to Spotify and search by genre, what you see is white people making our music. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s great, but I don’t understand why we don’t keep doing it. It seems that we are only interested in hip hop, and we shouldn’t forget where we come from, ”he says. “You have to reoccupy that space or, at least, some kind of space in that sense,” he adds.
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Does Leon Bridges believe in the social responsibility of the artist? In June of last year he posted a topic, Sweeter, in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police in the USA. He signed it together with Terrace Martin, who is among the producers of Gold-Diggers Sound. “I have spent a long time without finding the words to complain about the injustice that something like this supposes, and I finally found them. The artist is not obliged to be a political figure, but he must do the right thing, “he says. The assault on the Capitol last January frightened him greatly. He saw it as “a symptom of the horrible, the sad, of the human condition” and, at the same time, of something that “has always been there and will always be”. The good thing about social networks, he says, “is that today the bad guys are more exposed than ever, and we are more aware of their existence.”
He was looking forward to getting back on stage after “these almost two years without an audience.” Next Sunday he will begin the tour of the new album and until then he spends his days with his lifelong friends and family in Fort Worth, as being there keeps him “grounded.” At times he wonders if at some point everything will go back to the way it was before in the rhythm & blues, if it will stop being a dying genre. “If I could live in a different era, I would choose the seventies, because I think it was when I was better rhythm & blues it was done. It was experimental, of conquering new territories. And socially, the world was a place infinitely less complicated than in the fifties and sixties, where the social climate must have been unbreathable ”.
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