Khruangbin & Leon Bridges Want You to Rethink What Texas Sounds Like
On a surface level, a Leon Bridges-and-Khruangbin collaboration could feel surprising. Bridges blew up in 2015 when his single “Coming Home” made him the face of what critics called “the true” neo-soul revival, tirelessly (and perhaps lazily) naming him the second coming of Sam Cooke. Khruangbin, a psychedelic jam band trio—with Laura Lee on bass, Donald Johnson Jr. on drums, and Mark Speer on guitar—makes songs spanning a slew of global influences that often hit the four-minute mark without any lyrics.
In general, the pair’s latest collaborative EP, Texas Moon, is a similar cauldron of contradictions, bringing together Bridges’s big label record career and Khruangbin’s slow rise to indie stardom, sultry love songs and the Catholic Church, psychedelia and the seemingly straight-laced state of Texas.
Yet the pairing actually makes all the sense in the world. “We got the common thread of Texas and faith, so it was kind of inevitable for us to get together and make music,” Bridges says.
Bridges grew up in Fort Worth, which he describes as a “quaint, laid-back kind of city,” whereas Lee hails from Houston, a much larger pond in comparison.
Texas Moon is the follow-up EP to 2020’s Texas Sun, the pair’s first collaboration, which arose after Khruangbin opened for Bridges on his 2018 Good Thing Tour. During that period, Bridges was making music for what he calls “the machine,” pumping out the slicked-down tracks that most fans are likely familiar with. But for every pop-soul, ’60s-inspired R&B song that Bridges performed, there were piles of ideas that didn’t quite fit into that small box. That’s where Khruangbin came in.
“We were like, ‘Yeah, dude, give us all your rejects,’” Lee adds with a laugh. “Obviously not rejects at all, but we were like, ‘If there’s anything you can’t use, we’ll take it.’”
“It’s a liberating feeling to not have any expectations really. It feels really good to not have to adhere to any type of formula or anything,” Bridges affirms.
The result, Texas Moon, is a beautiful marriage of Bridges’s sleekness and Khruangbin’s inimitable funk. Bridges seems to meet Khruangbin in their galaxy, grounding them on Earth with familiar vocals. The laid-back psychedelia might not immediately elicit thoughts of Texas, but the molasses-like smoothness sounds something like the melting Texas heat, or driving with the top down on a summer night—a tailored soundtrack for life’s easiest days.
Perhaps the record’s most impressive feat is its contrasting ability to make some of life’s realest moments sound breezy and approachable, a testament to the artists’ mutual respect for one another.
For the EP’s opener, “Doris,” Bridges brought a song about his late grandmother’s passing to his bandmates: “You taught me how to be a real man,” he sings, with Lee’s bass line standing tall beside him.
“I think because of the subject matter, it really felt like it deserved a lot of honor, and the light-handedness of its sound probably comes from that sort of feeling,” Lee explains.
It helps that both Bridges and Lee grew up in the church. Lee met her bandmates, Speer and Johnson Jr., a.k.a. DJ, after hearing them play at St. John’s United Methodist Church, most famously known for its members Beyoncé and Solange Knowles. Bridges also grew up in the church, though he says he’s gotten further away from his faith in recent years. “My walk with God definitely looks different than it did,” he says. (“Just a man with unclean hands, from you, I hide my faith,” he quietly proclaims on “Father, Father.”) Though, to put things in perspective, at one point he was apprehensive to even write love songs given his standing in the church. Now, the influence is a bit subtler.
“It’s incredible what you can accomplish through music at church, and through bringing people faith and comfort, or the ability to make it okay to cry and feel. I feel like that’s the thing that we try to take away from it. Can you make somebody feel something from your music?” Lee asks. There are discreet nods to these emotions, like on “B-Side” and “Chocolate Hills,” in which the group utilizes a Hammond organ, most often used in church choirs, to elicit the same type of universally stirring reverberation.
Aside from church, the duo pulls from a much more complicated set of influences. When Bridges first picked up the guitar, he was finishing an intense phase of college discovery that included Frank Ocean, Little Dragon, and James Blake, and was just beginning to lean into the instrumentalism of Van Morrison and Neil Young.
When Lee learned how to play bass, she was listening to French icon Serge Gainsbourg and English alt-rock group Doves, though she grew up in a house that oscillated between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (her father’s picks), Gloria Estefan and the Carpenters (her mother’s picks), and Mexican bolero music (her grandmother’s pick).
Yet for a combined list of influences that seemingly has no bounds, there’s an undeniable streamlined simplicity in the music, an intentional ode to the art of white space. It’s a skill that Lee—who studied art history in college, working in a handful of galleries early in her career—says she pulled from artist James Turrell, who is famous for works that feature only a few stray rays of colorful light.
“It’s simple but incredibly epic and powerful in its simplicity. Space is a weapon in his artwork. And I feel like we always take the approach that space is just as important as filling it,” she says. “It’s like really special sushi. It’s like when you go and have omakase; you’re just having one piece at a time, there’s just the right amount of soy sauce, and, like, let’s not go crazy. It’s just perfect.”
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