Leon Bridges opens up about his struggles with fame

About right for an artist who swept everyone, even Barack Obama, off their feet with his debut album, Coming Home, dripping with golden horn arrangements, doo-wops and love ballads about girls with ‘legs long as the bayou trees’. It’s retro make-out music calling to mind open-top convertibles in sweltering summer sunshine. The former president of the United States was so smitten that he invited Bridges to play at the White House, twice, including at Obama’s last birthday as Commander-in-Chief.

‘I remember walking in and thinking, “Oh my God, that’s Samuel L Jackson, that’s Tyler Perry, that’s George Lucas, that’s Chance the Rapper, that’s Janelle Monáe.”’ It was such a riot, he says, that no one could hear Stevie Wonder sing on stage. ‘So Michelle [Obama] got on stage and just yelled: “Shut up!”’

Bridges was weighing up whether to invite Obama to his 30th birthday party this month in Puerto Rico when he ‘ran into his older daughter, Malia, at this bar in New York and she was like, “Oh my God — Oh my God, I really love your music, I gotta come up to a show,” and I was like, “Yeah, bring your dad!”’

It’s a typical snapshot of Bridge’s dishrags-to-riches fairy-tale story: an everyman blessed with a voice so breathtaking it lifted him from small-town Texas, washing plates in a Tex-Mex restaurant, to the White House, then round the world on continent-spanning tours. But now that it’s calm and quiet he tells me that he really misses home.

‘That’s definitely my light at the end of the tunnel during touring, that I can go home and be with my friends and family,’ he says, pointing out the various tattoos on his body: 817, the area code of his home town, Fort Worth; an outline of Texas’s state line; his mother’s name, Lisa Sawyer (also a song title), which he had inked in New Orleans.

It has been a steep learning curve. Coming Home was a revival of the 1960s soul era sung by a young, modern man from the South — but critics wondered if he could write anything more original. And so came Good Thing last year: funkier, fresher, a ‘melting pot of different sounds’. Bridges has loved touring it, but bad reviews stay with you. When he played Brixton O2 last November, a major newspaper reported ‘a chant that struck up during a jazzy section mid-gig, urging Bridges to stick to his old material’.

‘It’s like, when I was doing their first stuff, it’s like I wasn’t authentic enough, like I was biting off the soul artists from the past,’ says Bridges, who also blames technical issues for the poorly received gig. ‘Then when I try to do something a little bit different, modern and more unique, in a way, it’s like people weren’t feeling that. But, you know, if the fans didn’t f*** with new s*** they wouldn’t go to the show.’ Making ‘an unpredictable move’ was vital to ‘just have longevity in my career’, he says.

Beneath his sunshine surface, Bridges is a fretter. His first burst into the spotlight left him ‘overexposed’. He was just 25, from a city with a population of less than 900,000. Suddenly, he was the centre of attention, and ‘everything from feeling inadequate in a way, to feeling I’m not a good enough singer, or songwriter, or handsome enough. All that s*** played into my depression.’ He couldn’t stand ‘billions of photos being taken’, he worried he wasn’t ‘smart enough to come across as articulate’.

He drank more. ‘I wouldn’t call myself an alcoholic, but, like, for me, I couldn’t perform without drinking because it made me less self-aware when I was on stage. It was just one of those things that, with the lifestyle, was just so easy, like, to drink every day. When I was out it was usually five to 10 shots, a beer, and that was happening every day. Maybe a couple of shots before the show, then after the show, more drinking. Then when I’m at home, more. So I made new rules when I was like, okay, don’t drink during the week.’

A tight friendship group helped dig him out (he’s cut back on whisky on his tour rider, too). ‘Because there have been moments in the past when I’d literally get drunk, and get super emotional and start bawling, because I’m bottling up all this anxiety because of all my insecurities.’

Obama told him to ‘stay raw’ when he met him — and, notably, Bridges opened up on Good Thing. Is he more confident in his subjects, now? ‘When I wrote Coming Home, I was still in the church bubble. And so I had to write songs that were not as sex orientated as Good Thing,’ he says. ‘The more I progress the more I want to make that kind of music. But the question is, are my fans ready for that energy? I don’t know if they’re ready for if I’m like...’ he says, pausing before breaking into a glorious falsetto, ‘I want to freeeeeak you all night long!’

Does he find dating a problem on tour? ‘Man’, he says, laughing bashfully. ‘I’ve definitely Tindered, and Bumbled, and Raya is amazing.’ If he’s ‘playing a show, of course, it’s going to be hot. If I go to a bar somebody’s going to recognise me. But when I’m dancing, that’s usually how I connect with girls.’

Connections, more widely, are important and Bridges is all about spreading the love in a world that seems more hateful by the day. A lot has changed since the Obama days. ‘No one cared about politics until the orange man,’ he says. ‘I miss a president who can dance, or who had flavour. I’ve never been huge into politics, you know what I’m saying? But it’s crazy that I was able to play for and meet the first black president.’

He thinks a lot about race. ‘My shows are predominantly white, and that’s something that I have been criticised for by some of the black community. And that’s disheartening. Because I have no control over my audience.’ He does ‘desire to see more diversity’, so what’s the solution? ‘It’s all about sticking to my guns and just doing me because look, my style of music is not trendy. But you go to a 21 Savage show and the demographic will still be predominantly white because trap music, hip hop, that’s the new rock ’n’ roll.’

On a social scale, he worries ‘there’s no way to escape racism. It’s something that’s deep-rooted in America.’ He tries not to let it bother him, but ‘man, you know, being a black man in the South, in Texas, I’ve definitely seen it. I’ve seen racism, towards myself, towards my friends. You can go back to when I was a kid, walking home, and you’ve got a group of white kids in a truck calling me n***er. Or the time my back-up singer, who’s my best friend, was stopped by police in front of our house in Fort Worth that we were leasing. And his girlfriend happens to be white, and the cop was like, “Oh, is this man bothering you?” And that’s awful.’ But every time Bridges feels down he imagines ‘Barack Obama, somewhere, still dancing to one of my songs’.