TO THE MOON

The concept of a supergroup isn’t new, but it’s never without its intrigue. Artists who’ve thrived on their own come together to form a new project, that when done the right way can grow their success exponentially. More importantly, fans of each artist are over the moon. Recent unions have included Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars’ funk-pop Silk Sonic duo, indie stars Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus’ mighty Boygenius trio, the phenomenal rap pairing of El-P and Killer Mike on Run The Jewels, and now on their second trip down the highway, the super-Texan collaboration of Khruangbin and Leon Bridges. Unlike the mainstream splash of Silk Sonic, the femme-forward space that Boygenius had to carve out for themselves, or the previous history that Run The Jewels had with each other, Khruangbin and Bridges’ union is more akin to the relative obscurity of 1975’s Gil e Jorge. It’s an album where Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben Jor, two titans of Brazilian samba and tropicalia, recorded music defined less by its tightly-produced magnifications of each artist’s distinction, and more about a spiritual and improvisational alchemy that developed in the studio devoid of any outside forces. With Gil e Jorge, fans of both went nuts. It was an incredibly unexpected, but wholly welcome joining of forces. And that’s exactly what’s in the air right now with Khruangbin and Leon Bridges as their second EP, Texas Moon — the companion piece to 2020’s wildly popular Texas Sun — comes out on February 18th via Dead Oceans.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Afritina CokeR

EDITION 11 FEBRUARY 2022

JANUARY 27, 2022

BY: WONGO OKON

That Khruangbin and Leon Bridges existed in largely different musical realms before this is what made this collaboration initially a pleasant surprise. Bridges became a modern major label R&B/soul force on his 2015 debut album Coming Home. The Fort Worth native has six Grammy Awards nominations under his belt, including one win for the 2018 single “Bet Ain’t Worth The Hand” in the Best Modern R&B Performance category. Last July, he released his third album, Gold-Diggers Sound on Columbia Records, which saw him working with Lizzo producers Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau to enact far more traditional studio R&B than the classic soul nostalgia of his debut. Khruangbin, on the other hand, have until recently only resided in pockets of indie that revere them for their blissed-out funk inspired by crate-digging gems from Thailand, the Middle East, and other corners of the world. The Houston trio of guitarist Mark Speer, bassist Laura Lee, and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson made a mark with their 2015 full-length debut The Universe Smiles Upon You, before signing with powerhouse indie label Dead Oceans for 2018’s Con Todo El Mundo and 2020’s Mordechai. To their credit, they’ve been enacting sounds that had been so far removed from mainstream consciousness, that they’ve seemingly inspired a genre unto themselves, evidenced by the countless “Khruangbin Vibes” YouTube playlists with millions of spins that are filled with similarly-minded tunes and seem to be a favorite of YouTube’s algorithm. The convivial breeziness of their sound has also made them a quintessential festival band. Speer and Lee show palpable chemistry on stage in their signature black wigs, and Johnson paces the beat behind them while revelers bask in the vibey tunes and lose themselves in the moment. It was this magnetic quality of Khruangbin’s music that drew Bridges to them to begin with. Driving between locations for the video shoot of his and Dej Loaf’s unity anthem “Liberated,” a friend played it for him in the car and he was instantly taken by it. “As a songwriter, their music is just really perfect to sing over,” Bridges says on Zoom from his home in Fort Worth, while Lee, Johnson, and Speer are on the call from their respective locales in New York’s Hudson Valley, Houston, and Oakland. “Even before we met I’d sing random shit over their tracks, like everybody else. It was just hella soulful to me.” Shortly after coming off a tour of South America with Harry Styles, Bridges invited Khruangbin to open for his 2018 headlining tour. They met in person for the first time at the opening tour stop at Red Rocks in Colorado and they instantly hit it off. After each show on the tour, the four Texans would hang backstage as Speer spun records he bought in each city they were in. “I’d walk to the nearest record store and just buy 45s, since they’re smaller, and easier to transport,” Speer says. “But by the end of that run, I had like 1,000 45s.” “It was definitely one of the best tours I’ve ever been on,” Bridges adds, with the rest nodding in agreement, affirming the genuine connection they all formed. There has long been an inherent balance between the three personalities of Khruangbin and they help keep each other level. Bridges became an extension of that. “The thing about being on the road with Leon was how quickly we became family members,” Speer says. “That doesn’t happen all the time.”

One of the commonalities that made the foursome so close was the Texan background that they all share. The pride they each feel for their home state resonated with every interaction. “There’s an unspoken thing between Texans,” Johnson says. ”It’s a vibe between us that we inherently all have. No matter where you’re from there’s a connection.” “And Texans are very Texas proud.” Lee adds. “That's why it’s the most tattooed state!” On an evening in Montana on that first tour following their show at Missoula’s Big Sky Brewing Amphitheater, Lee sent Bridges a song the band had been working on. In an instant of inspiration, Bridges wrote a lyrical skeleton and melody to it and then hopped on GarageBand to record it by himself. It was the moment that sparked the collaboration and laid the building blocks for their initial sessions together the following year. In 2019 and then again in late 2020, Bridges came to Houston where they wrote and recorded at Terminal C Studios with Khruangbin’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen. Stemming from that initial song exchange on tour, “B-Side” was the first track that fully materialized from the sessions and it appears as the lead single on the new Texas Moon EP, which is meant to live as an extension of Texas Sun, not a separate project. Together, the music is a sublime new wrinkle to Bridges’ repertoire and marks the first time Khruangbin wrote alongside a singer outside of the band (on Mordechai, they began introducing their own vocals in sparse arrangements.)

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Writer: Adrian Spinelli @agspinelli Photographer: Afritina Coker @afritina Production Assistant: Natasha Walker @tashigolean22 Stylists: Megan Boyes @meganjaneboyes Omar Lisandro @omar_lisandro Gabriella Tena @lagabstyle Creative Consulting: Jackie Lee Young @jackieleeyoung DesignED BY: DAISY JAMES @DJAMESDESIGN

Where “B-Side” feels decidedly like part of the Khruangbin canon with its exotic guitar and funky air, “Chocolate Hills” showcases a stripped-down sense of Bridges’ voice that feels especially tender. Over Johnson’s calming snare taps, Lee’s gentle groove, and Speer’s subtle tweaks everywhere else, Bridges’ delivery hits distinctly different. Almost as if Khruangbin gave him something he’d been missing. “Being under ‘the machine,’ you kind of have to adhere to whatever the label’s ideas are or whatever producer you’re working with,“ Bridges says. “And whenever I’m doing that it’s more polished, but it’s still a vibe. Although I think my collaboration with Khruangbin is really where my heart is. I love how raw our sound is.”

Before success at the Grammys, before three straight albums in the top 20 of the Billboard 200 (his second album, Good Thing, peaked at No. 3 in 2018), and before performing “The Christmas Song” with Michael Bublé on NBC this past December, Bridges didn’t think the nature of his music could thrive in the industry. Inspired by turn-of-the-millennium R&B, he started singing casually in jam sessions with friends at Tarrant County College (TCC) in Fort Worth. His time at TCC didn’t last though, as he had to leave school to help support his mother and took up a job as a dishwasher, a narrative that marked his ascent in the Coming Home days. But he was playing guitar in his downtime, writing songs and feeling a desire to let his voice be heard. This led him to become a regular at open mic sessions in and around Fort Worth. At one of these sessions, Austin Jenkins — of Austin psych-rock staples White Denim — approached Bridges after his set, digging what he heard, and offered to record the songs. Together, they yielded a batch of tracks that they put up on SoundCloud. “That’s kinda what sparked everything,” Bridges, who was soon signed to Columbia Records, says. “My whole plan was just to keep working on guitar and keep writing songs. I was gonna hop in a van and road trip and maybe find open mics if nothing else.” But he wasn’t making R&B yet. “That was around the time in my life where I had a spiritual awakening, where I tossed away all my secular CDs and music,” Bridges says. ”And I walked the path of righteousness so to speak. I was super Christian and I was inspired at that time thinking that current gospel music was a little corny. So I kinda set out to write modern gospel music.”

Coincidentally, it was playing gospel music at Houston’s St. John’s United Methodist Church — yes, the same church Beyoncé and Solange attended as kids — where Speer and Johnson forged their friendship in the mid-aughts. They played in the church band for a decade. Rehearsals were on Tuesday night and they’d go straight from the St. John’s United to Rudyard’s Pub, around the corner from The Flat, a vibrant worldly music lounge in the Hyde Park neighborhood. “That’s where I met Laura Lee, when she started crashing those hangs,” Johnson says. “And the rest is history as they say.” “Didn’t I go there with y’all last time?” Bridges asks as Johnson finishes telling the story. “Yeah!” both Speer and Lee recall before Speer shares a memory. “The gal who was taking care of us at Rudyard’s was like ‘Wow, you look a lot like Leon Bridges!’ And you were like ‘Yeah, I get that a lot,” Speer adds. Bridges is soft-spoken and unassuming, he wears shades on our video call, but is beyond forthcoming and makes an effort to be as thoughtful as possible in everything he says. If his demeanor matches anyone from Khruangbin the most, it’s with the collected Johnson, who admitted he had to adjust his style of playing and performing when he began taking the stage with the band. “In church, the whole thing is to be of service to the music,“ Johnson says. “Not to be seen, not to call attention to yourself or this fly kick pattern… Conceptually, that kind of playing that we were doing in church still comes out on stage though. Because who you are comes out through your musical instrument. Whether it be your drums, bass, guitar, or, in Leon’s case, his voice.”

we became family members

For Lee, a spirited, wordly Bohemian who grew up in a Catholic Mexican-American family herself, she, Johnson, and Speer ate at Rudyard’s every Tuesday for three years before she ever picked up a bass guitar. Lee and Speer connected over their mutual love for global music obscurities and they all formed a musical relationship, but not in practice at first. Then one day, Lee picked up Speer’s bass. “He was very happy,” Lee says. “Mark is very encouraging to people he sees a musical spark in and he saw an interest in me to play it, so he gave me little breadcrumbs along my path to help me find my own way.” Speer is indeed incredibly enthusiastic when he senses your interest in any aspect of music. He’s like that crate-digger friend, who started a band that got massively popular and now has a much larger platform than just his favorite corner of his local record store. I mention how some of the production on Texas Moon is reminiscent of David Axelrod, and he immediately begins citing Axelrod among the artists that are part of Khruangbin’s core DNA: “Dao Bandon, Serge Gainsbourg, Sutrak Aksonthong, David Axelrod, and Roy Ayers. Those are all very crucial DNA strands.” He fostered Lee’s bass playing and when his friend Joe Corrales Jr. of the electrogaze rock band Yppah needed a guitarist and bassist for a tour, Speer and Lee, who had come into her own as a bassist, heeded the call and toured together for the first time in 2009. Khruangbin was born in 2010 with Johnson rounding out the trio. “DJ has perfect pitch and perfect timing and he’s so studied and disciplined in a way that I’ll never be able to catch up even if I wanted to,” says the modest Lee, who channels the sounds of the globe with her bass. “Mark is always on the hunt for the chord that’s never been chorded and trying to find things that have never happened. And then Leon comes in and it’s very clear what his thing is. He opens his mouth and it’s just glorious. Mark always says that we could just give Leon a grocery list to read and it would sound so good.”

Texas Sun and now Texas Moon present far more than a grocery list for Bridges to reel off. These are songs about life in Texas, about love, death, faith, infatuation, and joy. Bridges describes their collaboration as a marriage of R&B and country, his lyrics are often deeply personal and there’s an inherent spirituality that binds the four musicians together. With them producing the album in-house, it left infinite room to improvise and just create in the moment to see what emerges. “Father, Father” might be the best example of this. It opens with a hypnotic guitar that moves in wavelengths. The bass and drums slide alongside it as Bridges begins to speak to a higher power, or his father — it’s truly left open for interpretation — before his words sink into a separate backing track beneath his singing. Speer gets excited describing the production and time just seems to stop as he goes off: “It creates repetition to the point of trance, as George Clinton will tell you,” he says of the tune, also likening it to devotionals from India. “But when you’re playing it with real people in a real situation, you can bring the intensity up or down, slow it or speed it up. So we’re taking this very simple ostinato and playing it over and over again and creating this trance. And Leon is telling this story and there’s plenty of space for him to stop singing and breathe and let the audience soak that in and think about it and then come back.” “I really liked having you talk over it,” he says to Bridges. “Like when you’re playing live at church and there’s people in the audience going 'Yeah! I feel that!'”

And in fact, the entire supergroup almost never came to fruition as Bridges says some people at the label were opposed to the project altogether. “I really thought that was wild,” he says. When Lee caught wind of the possibility that the label might kill the project, she was undeterred. This was a step in the legacy of the four of them and a project that could very well continue to grow into something amazing. “I sent a very headstrong email to all of the people I knew at Columbia as a part of Leon’s team, with all of our label people copied,” Lee says. “And I just said 'You’d be doing the world a disservice, our fans, Leon’s fans. It’s beautiful music.’ I literally said ‘I am on my knees, please help me put this out. Whatever it takes.’ And eventually, it got pushed through. And I’m so glad. I think we won!” “You go and do all the polished stuff, but some of my biggest songs are from Texas Sun,” Bridges adds. “It shows that this is the sound that people were definitely hungry for.”

“I’m glad you encouraged me to do that,” Bridges replies. “Because I would’ve never thought to do that in that song.” There’s an inherent trust that’s palpable between Bridges and each member of the band when they speak to each other. It’s what empowered him to bring “Doris” to them, a tune written from Bridges’ father’s perspective, and the final moment he spent with his grandmother as she died. It’s the song that sounds the most like a David Axelrod production; celestial, otherworldly, and incredibly psychedelic. “'Doris' is the band favorite,” Lee admits as everyone nods emphatically. “It deals with the supernatural and almost like the ghost of someone. It’s really special.” “I appreciate Leon putting that into our hands, because it’s such a delicate piece of work,” Johnson adds. “We know what it’s about and again, it’s not about calling attention to yourself. It’s about the band. Let’s pay our respects to Doris within the song.” “Doris” was actually meant to be on Texas Sun — yet another reminder that these two EP’s belong together and not apart — but the band says Bridges’ label didn’t think it was strong enough for the record. “We had a record’s worth of songs ready to go and Columbia was like, ‘No,’” Speer says.

TEXANS ARE VERY TEXAS PROUD

my collaboration with Khruangbin is really where my heart is. I love how raw our sound is.

this is the sound that people were definitely hungry for

February 15, 2022

BY: Adrian Spinelli

khruangbin

LEON BRIDGES