Aspiring soul star invites audience on a retro music trip around America.
The singer-songwriter from Texas is not yet thirty, but his debut album Coming Home will take you back to the American sixties. With vintage melodies, a laid-back rhythm, soulful brass, a dusty pipe organ, and doo-wop backing vocals, his light voice brings to mind some of the greatest R&B and soul singers of the past, such as Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.
Curiously, Bridges claims that at the time he started his musical career he knew nothing of Cooke and Redding. A shy Detroit kid, he grew up on the radio pop of the nineties and was only intuitively drawn to the retro style, which now shows itself even in his high-waisted trousers and fifties-style boots. Although the geography of his songs will seem familiar to any black music connoisseur, Louisiana, New Orleans, and Mississippi are as related to his personal and family history as they are to the history of a large part of the nation.