Summer’s right around the bend, and concert season is being prefaced with some silky sweet performers. Today’s Leon Bridges and Son Little concert is my first official live experience of the year, and I would venture to guess that it’s going to be my favorite non-festival concert of 2016. Leon Bridges and Son Little both have very classical 50’s/60’s musical styles with a fusion of swing and soul music. Bridges also has a very distinctive retro fashion style which fits perfectly with old school musical style.

Despite Leon Bridges being an obvious talent, his career in music is especially brief. He worked cleaning dishes and playing at open mic nights at The Grotto and Forever Jamboree in Fort Worth, TX. Bridges was first discovered by members of the rock band White Denim who heard him perform the title track “Coming Home” and were blown away. They had him record the track with some musicians they knew and upload it to SoundCloud where it quickly went viral and got noticed by Colombia Records, where he signed ion 2014. “Coming Home” was released as his first single in 2015 by Colombia Records and made the Top 10 Most Viral Tracks list on Spotify the same month of its release. Since then, the full-length album “Coming Home” was nominated for best R&B album at the Grammy’s, and Bridges has toured and been featured on songs with Pharrell Williams as well as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

Both Song Little and Leon Bridges were prominently featured on my top 100 songs of 2015 list, while Leon Bridges album “Coming Home” was ranked #2 on my favorite albums of 2015. In the spirit of the concert setlist, here is a playlist that includes some of Son Little as the opener and a lot of Leon Bridges as the headliner. As a side note for those who have been keeping track, the last five songs on this playlist are actually new, as they are part of a new deluxe version of the album that was released at the beginning of February.