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Lone Star Great: Leon Bridges Keeps His Cool (Cover Story)

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The greats can win any venue.

If you have the tough-to-define “It,” then it works at a coffeehouse, it works at a club, it works at a theater, it works at an arena and it works in a stadium.

Accepting that the great It has universal utility, it is clear that certain artists just work better in particular types of venues. “Arena rock” is a genre for a reason, after all.

Could Leon Bridges be an exclusively arena artist? Sure. He sold out his hometown Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 15, 2024. According to Pollstar Boxoffice reports, he moved 9,709 tickets for a $767,251 gross at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, in July 2022, and sold out Austin’s Moody Center a month later for a $898,664 gross.

So, yes, Leon Bridges can do arenas, but that’s not where he really cooks.

“I want all my artists to all be in the biggest venues,” Bridges’ agent, Creative Artists Agency’s Bobby Cory, says. “I want Leon to be the biggest artist on the planet. …. What’s most important for Leon is it works everywhere: indoor, outdoors, large, small, because of the artist he is. Leon can play anywhere. That’s the thing.”

But Leon Bridges is perfectly suited for a certain atmosphere.

He is stylish in a way that is simultaneously eye-catching and unaffected. His outfits fit together like the coastlines of distant continents, the tectonics of his fashion apparent to the untrained eye but only once they’ve been made manifest by an expert.

His voice is as extraordinary as his aesthetic: a smoky, soulful baritone that flows through a room like a slow dance and wraps around listeners like a lover’s embrace.

“His voice has ease and comfort and there’s this marriage between the voice and his guitar,” Mick Management’s Zeke Hutchins, who along with Jonathan Eshak manages Bridges, says. “I took him early on to the BMI showcase at Sundance and I heard this woman say ‘His voice sounds like warm cornbread.’”

In other words: Leon Bridges is cool in the ineffable way that cool people are.

If Middle Ages philosophers spent their time imagining perfect nightclubs instead of perfect islands, Leon Bridges would be on the stage, his songs the ideal soundtrack to furtive touches under candlelight.

Bridges is proud he was able to play arenas while also recognizing he just works better in a smaller format.

“When I did my first arena tour, we got through it but honestly I feel like I needed more time for rehearsal to be in those venues,” he says. “It was a great milestone but I do prefer playing in the more intimate, 3,000-cap spots.”

For a guy like Bridges who has such a natural and innate ability to mesmerize a room, it’s perhaps unexpected that his career really took off when the right people heard him from the business end of an aux cord.

Hutchins and Cory have eerily similar stories of discovery and the common denominator is, oddly enough, the founding members of experimental genre-fusing Austin rockers White Denim.

“Jonathan Eshak and I were walking at the Newport Folk Festival on our way to set up the Deer Tick after-parties that became quite infamous and he said ‘Check this out,’ and gave me his earbud and it was Leon playing. And I said ‘What is this?’ and he said ‘Keep listening.’ He said it’s this guy Josh (Block) and Austin (Jenkins) from White Denim had seen playing around Fort Worth. Then he showed me Leon’s Instagram page … and he looked like Sam Cooke,” Hutchins says.

For Cory, Eshak handed him the earbud on a walk in New York City as the two were headed to the gym.

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YELLOW ROSE: Leon Bridges performs at Nashville’s Ryman Audi- torium during his three-night run at the famed building. His agent, CAA’s Bobby Cory, said the shows were “the talk of the town” and was “the place to be” in Music City. Photo by Torie Conroy

“Thanks to the White Denim guys, they got us all in the mix,” he says. “It was instantaneous love. It was something new. It was a blast from the past. It was genuine. I’m listening and I’m seeing him – and I’m hearing an artist that everyone wants to win, everyone wants him to win.”

Bridges was, by training, a dancer. He wanted to be Usher. He split time growing up between his mother’s very religious Fort Worth home — her music taste wasn’t totally sacred; Bridges says his mom also listened to smooth soul singers like Sade and Anita Baker — and his father’s more laid back set-up in Atlanta, where he heard funkier jams from the likes of Earth, Wind and Fire. He taught himself guitar by watching YouTube and picking out chords. He fell in with a group that played open mics around the city.

“It was a cool time,” Bridges says. “There were a lot of talented people that really inspired me during that time and it’s crazy because all those open mics are kind of non-existent today and it was cool. It was a mix of poetry and mostly singer-songwriter, alternative stuff.”

That expanded Bridges’ musical margins — he was still deeply steeped into R&B and soul. “Honestly, those guys really inspired me to delve into blues and that’s when I started listening to Townes Van Zandt and Van Morrison and Neil Young,” he says.

He eventually developed a deep enough repertoire to record — those early tracks, those just-cut, barely-mixed, hardly-engineered demos that White Denim shared with Eshak that he evangelized to his friends and colleagues. The ones that inspired the Mick Management guys to make a trip. 

“We flew to Fort Worth to meet him and introduce ourselves. He had booked himself a slot with his buddy at a happy hour at Shaw’s Burgers. There’s literally seven people” — Bridges says it was only five — “and he hops up and plays three songs and we couldn’t believe we were watching this. Shortly thereafter we made it more official,” Hutchins says.

Cory and CAA were onboard nearly as quickly. 

Influential Texas-based music blog Gorilla vs Bear picked up Bridges’ demos and his listens spiked. Labels were champing at the bit, too. A showcase at The Stone Fox in Nashville attracted so much attention from industry types worldwide that the bar’s owner — William Tyler, the well-respected cosmic country guitarist who was formerly a member of Lambchop and the Silver Jews — called Hutchins to ask “What the hell is going on?”.

It was time to get Bridges on an honest-to-God tour and the singular artist was heading to singular venues.

“We booked him in these funky 200-cap places instantly with a band from Fort Worth and established his road foundation, which is something Jonathan and I and Mick Management are very serious about: we don’t skip steps and we build foundations,” Hutchins says.

Cory and his partners at CAA — Bridges’ team there now also includes Kate Arenson — had a complementary view.

“Part of our sales pitch was we have to get him out. We pitched him on this amazing run of playing these small crazy cool venues – The Green Mill in Chicago, Cliff Bell’s in Detroit – it was wild stuff. I always thought he was a larger than life persona and we could build mystique and do these small shows in these weird venues for his first shows. We kept it cool and vibey,” Cory says.

One of those shows — at Birmingham, Alabama’s BottleTree March 10, 2015 — is Bridges’ earliest reported show in the Pollstar Boxoffice: a 215-ticket sell-out grossing $1,703. By the end of that spring, he sold out the Troubadour in West Hollywood: a haul of $7,350 on 490 tickets.

For a guy who’d mostly done open mics, sitting in with his friends and doing a handful of showcases, that was quite a rapid rise.

“I think the main thing is I really had great people around me. I think I have good intuition because when I first met Austin Jenkins I knew I could trust him and it snowballed from there. He said, ‘Here’s my management,’ and I said, ‘If I can trust you, I can trust them’ – and we’ve been rocking for almost a decade,” Bridges says.

Indeed, much of Bridges’ team has been the same as when he first stepped on that “cool and vibey” tour: not just agent, management and his label team at Columbia, but even the lighting and sound crew members. It’s something the Mick team and CAA team celebrated after the Dickies Arena homecoming show.

That consistency is critical, even as Bridges’ sound has changed and his audience has grown.

“Throughout my journey I always tried to reinvent myself,” Bridges says. “The first album was ’60s R&B inspired and the next one was a modern version of that. Gold-Diggers Sound, I wanted to make my own version of modern R&B and with Leon [released in October], I felt that the fans wanted me to get back to the sound of why they fell in love with me in the first place, but without doing Coming Home part 2.0 and that was kind of inspiration for Leon.”

Leon is also a paean to Fort Worth, a city often overlooked in favor of not just its Metroplex sibling, but its statemates of gargantuan Houston and music-mad Austin. And it gave the team at Mick and CAA a chance to get Bridges back into those rooms he loves the most.

“Leon is a crooner in a lot of ways and that intimacy is not totally lost [in an arena], but you have to cater your setlist. With the Leon record, we’ve thought about it as a Sunday morning record or a dinner party record but not a dance party, so we thought we could do arenas but we said let’s do something different,” Hutchins said. “So that’s Beacon Theatre, Massey Hall, the Ryman and we did multiples. We pulled back production and Leon put the guitar back in his hands. This show has him playing guitar 80% of the time.”

Every Bridges tour, CAA’s Cory says, is built on keeping the trajectory upward and putting him in “places where people love to go.” Not just the iconic theaters Hutchins listed, but scenic amphitheaters like the Santa Barbara Bowl, The Greeks in Berkeley and Los Angeles and, of course, Red Rocks.

“At the same time we were doing secondaries. We played places like Birmingham and Louisville and now we can do 60 or 70 markets and sometimes five or six shows in those markets,” he says. “Could we have thrown him at MSG? Sure, but the idea of doing three shows at the Beacon was so appealing.”

Bridges said one of his favorite moments from the 2024 tour that took him into those grand palaces came after one of his tour-capping trio of shows at the Ryman (all were nearly sold out and all grossed around $261,000). 

“After the last show, me and my homie went to Robert’s Western World to get a drink and Chris Stapleton was in there sound checking and so I got to see ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ live for the first time,” he says.

“The whole time we were there was just magical. Our friends Hermanos Gutierrez joined us on stage for ‘Mariella,’” he says.

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BAND OF BROTHERS: Long-time friends Charley Crockett and Leon Bridges perform together. Crockett will open for Bridges at the Hollywood Bowl June 5. Photo by George Apodaca

The song was originally recorded as part of Bridges’ Texas Moon collaboration with psyche-soul rockers Khruangbin, one of many musically diverse partnerships Bridges has forged, which includes collabs with artists as varied as electronic favorites ODESZA and Diplo, trad-country badass Kacey Musgraves and Americana artist and long-time friend Charley Crockett. 

Later this month, Bridges will head Down Under for five dates in Australia and then he’ll be back stateside for a theater and amp run in the spring, which includes some prestige plays.

“We needed to do Red Rocks and we needed the Hollywood Bowl because we didn’t play L.A. on the last run,” Cory says. Crockett will join Bridges for the Bowl show.

“We used to frequent a lot of the same open mics and we got to get together and write a few times. That’s my brother,” Bridges says. “Throughout my whole career I’ve always tried to use my platform to shine light on some of my homies that I really respect and who inspired me.”

After that, Cory says to look out for a “big run” in the late summer and early fall in mostly outdoor venues in major markets.

And be prepared for Bridges to win whatever venue he’s in once again. 

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