Pino Palladino

Leon Bridges Finished Half of Happiness Anytime in Four Days

Leon Bridges

The first song arrived before the instrumental was finished. In April 2025, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto of the British group Jungle played Leon Bridges a skeletal track built around a Wurlitzer chord progression and a relaxed drum pattern, and he started singing as soon as it began. “Straight away he sang the first bit to ‘Your Love Is Electric,'” Lloyd-Watson recalls in notes released with the album. “And I’m like, ‘Whoo, let’s go. This is it.'”

Four days later, the three of them had six songs, half of the finished record. Happiness Anytime, the fifth studio album from Leon Bridges, is out today on Columbia Records: twelve tracks that the Fort Worth singer describes as being about “cultivating pockets of happiness”.

A Writing Session With One Rule

The collaboration grew out of chance meetings. Bridges and the Jungle pair kept crossing paths at festivals and shows, including one in Copenhagen, before deciding to try a low-pressure writing session in Los Angeles. “I always just loved their dance-y vibe, and I felt they were ideal collaborators,” Bridges told an interviewer in a conversation published by Yahoo last week.

The sessions ran on a simple rule. “We aren’t leaving until we have a full track at the end of the day,” Lloyd-Watson says in the album notes reported by BroadwayWorld. “We didn’t want to have, ‘We’ll come back to this tomorrow.’ We wanted fully finished tracks.” He puts the thinking behind it plainly: “First thought is the best thought. That’s where the emotion is.”

Bridges remembers the process as a release. “It was the most freeing experience of creating music,” he said. “We built everything on drum loops and we’d just pass the guitar around until we landed on something cool.” He is quick to credit his co-producer’s voice as well: “Lydia, man, her vocals, in my opinion, really carry a lot of these songs.”

Pino Palladino, Fela Kuti and a Party in Los Angeles

The record was completed across three fast sessions. When the trio reconvened in August 2025, they were drawing on Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, Brazilian music, soul, disco and South American rhythms. “We’d been listening to a lot of South American music and Sergio Mendes,” Lloyd-Watson says. “We infused it with these Latin rhythms and African rhythms,” he says, aiming for “music that had groove and soul and feeling.”

They also brought in a player with a long reach: the bassist Pino Palladino, whose credits include D’Angelo and Adele, joined them at Chaplin Recording Studios in Los Angeles to complete the album. The label’s notes describe echoes of Fela Kuti, the wanderlust of Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints and the warmth of Jorge Ben, while insisting the record never feels referential.

For Bridges, the Fela thread started almost by accident. He told the interviewer he knew only a few of the Nigerian musician’s songs until he heard one at a GQ party at the Chateau Marmont, and it sparked more ideas. “What I do a lot is, when I hear instrumental stuff, I’ll start freestyling over it,” he said. That track, he explained, inspired songs like “Illusion” and the deeper, introspective side of the album.

Getting Back Out Front to Dance

The other goal was movement. Early in his career, Bridges was out in front dancing, something that had waned in recent years. “Leon said he wants to have music that he can dance to,” Kitto recalls. “He wants to have moments where he can put the guitar down and just dance and perform at the front.”

Dancing goes back a long way for him. He told the interviewer he fell for it at 11 or 12, practising his moonwalk after taping a Michael Jackson anniversary broadcast, and later danced with a company called Velocity while at Tarrant County College. “I’m always dancing, man,” he said. “I don’t really deem myself an amazing dancer. But I feel like I have my own style and expression.”

That has reshaped the live show. Bridges has been introducing the songs through Leon Bridges Presents Happiness Anytime, a reimagined stage production with a vinyl DJ, a horn section and three backing vocalists, inspired in part by the communal spirit of classic Jamaican dancehall culture. DIY reported that he previewed it in pop-up performances in Paris, Cannes, Los Angeles, at Montreux Jazz Festival and at London’s Jazz Cafe. Earlier this month he performed a medley of “Talk It Over”, “Light The Way” and “Illusion” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and “Watch You Dance” premiered on Apple Music 1 alongside an interview with Zane Lowe.

Why Happiness, and Why Now

Bridges is clear that the title is not a slogan about ignoring the world. “For me, happiness is not a feeling that you chase,” he said when the album was announced in July. “I want this album to be something that lingers with people and lingers in people’s bones. There’s this feeling that we have to fix the problems of the world; you feel inadequate or it can be debilitating. My role is to be light.”

He returned to the point in the Yahoo conversation. “It’s not [ignoring] issues of the world. Black people are no strangers to suffering and pain. But we’ve created the most beautiful art that’s come from our suffering,” he said. “If there’s chaos around, you can’t freak out or lose your cool. You gotta stand firm-rooted. That’s kind of what the album is for me.”

Some of the songs look back as well as forward. “Tears of Joy” is a thank-you, a song in which Bridges looks back at the years since his 2015 debut and imagines “10 more years of glory”. Lloyd-Watson hears it as a song about legacy: “What being on the road means. What you sacrifice to give this artistry to the world.” Kitto has the simplest explanation of the title: “It’s music you can put on no matter how you’re feeling, and it makes you feel happy and it makes you want to get up and dance.”

A Release in Three Parts

The album did not arrive all at once. Bridges released it in three instalments of four songs each, starting in July with “Light The Way”, “Tears of Joy”, “Illusion” and “Your Love Is Electric”, according to DIY, so eight of the twelve tracks were already out before today. The full tracklist runs: “Light The Way”, “Tears of Joy”, “Illusion”, “Your Love Is Electric”, “Talk It Over”, “Happiness Anytime”, “All Day, All Night” featuring Lydia Kitto, “Fly Baby”, “Watch You Dance”, “The Way It Goes”, “Take My Hand” and “Please Don’t Say Goodbye”.

Happiness Anytime follows Leon, his 2024 album, which Rated R&B notes debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s Top R&B Albums chart. The label’s notes position the new record as a return to the warmth of his 2015 debut Coming Home, combined with the adventurous groove of his two collaborative albums with Khruangbin. Across his career, Bridges has earned six Grammy nominations and one win.

What Comes After the Record

Bridges, who is 37, is already thinking beyond his own songs. He told the interviewer his next goal is to help aspiring artists who lack resources. “I actually had this thought to put together a crew of house musicians, almost like a Muscle Shoals vibe,” he said. “Whoever wants to make cool stuff, let’s do it.”

Where a record gets made often shapes how it sounds, and it has been a theme on NewMusic.News this month, from Happiness Anytime’s quick sessions in Los Angeles to the way Olivia Dean found a house where no music had been made.

For Leon Bridges, home remains fixed. “Fort Worth is forever gonna be home,” he said. Happiness Anytime is the sound of him leaving it for a few days, passing a guitar around a room in Los Angeles, and coming back with a record built to move.

By Will Lisil / September 25, 2026

Article Featured Music News Pop R&B Rock

Michael Kiwanuka Made Small Changes by Not Trying to Prove Anything

There is a particular problem that arrives after an album wins something. The next record has to answer it, and the usual answer is more: more production, more ideas, more evidence that the win was deserved.

Michael Kiwanuka went the other way, and was unusually explicit about why. “I wonder what an album will sound like when we’re not trying to be cool or anything, you know, we’re not trying to prove anything,” he told The Current. Small Changes is the record that came out of taking that question seriously.

What He Was Reacting Against Was His Own Record

Small Changes arrived on 22 November 2024 through Polydor and Interscope: eleven tracks, forty minutes and eighteen seconds, filed as psychedelic soul.

The album it is answering is Kiwanuka, which won the Mercury Prize, and his diagnosis of it is candid. “The production became, especially on Kiwanuka, like really, really relayed with so many ideas and so many sounds,” he said. He put both that record and 2016’s Love & Hate in the same category: “I definitely was in a different space of trying to prove a lot of things as an artist.”

Artists rarely say this about work that succeeded. Describing a prize-winning album as over-furnished is a real risk, and it only makes sense if the follow-up genuinely commits to the opposite. “I sort of went back to that, which was like, for me the right time,” he said. “Strip everything away and find out what it actually is.”

It is worth being precise about the record he is measuring himself against, because the modesty could read as false. Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize. Following that with a quieter album is not the safe option dressed up as bravery — it is the option that forfeits the obvious way to capitalise on a win, which is to give the audience a larger version of what it just rewarded.

The Same Producers, a Different Instruction

The interesting decision is that he did not change the team. Danger Mouse and Inflo co-produced Small Changes, as they had Kiwanuka, and as Danger Mouse had Love & Hate before that — a third consecutive collaboration.

Changing your sound by keeping your producers is harder than changing your producers. It means the difference has to come from instruction rather than from personnel, and there is nobody new to blame if it does not land.

Kiwanuka’s account of what he learned is about restraint on his own side as much as theirs. “I’ve learned quite a few things that makes the process even a bit easier,” he said. “Just do what you do, which actually is easier for everyone.” On Danger Mouse specifically: “You can just ask any question, and you know you’re gonna get, like, a really interesting answer, or something you’ve never really considered.”

The writing credits show how deep the partnership runs. Every track is credited to Kiwanuka with Brian Burton and Dean Josiah Cover — Danger Mouse and Inflo’s given names — except the closer, “Four Long Years”, written by Kiwanuka and Burton alone.

What Understated Actually Means Here

His description of the goal is specific: “a lot more understated” than Kiwanuka, and “more about the voice, more about my voice, and more about the lyrics”.

That is a mixing brief as much as a writing one. Putting a voice forward is not a matter of turning it up; it requires everything else to stop competing for the same frequencies and the same attention. The eleven tracks are correspondingly compact — “Live For Your Love” at 2:29, “Lowdown (Part II)” at 2:40 — with only “Four Long Years” and “One and Only” pushing past four and a half minutes.

The two-part “Lowdown” is the tell. Splitting an idea into Part I and Part II rather than developing it across one longer track is a decision to let a thing be what it is and then stop, which is precisely the discipline he says he was after.

The rollout matched the thesis. “Floating Parade” appeared on 10 July 2024, the two-part “Lowdown” on 12 September, and “The Rest of Me” on 3 October — three months of singles that arrive and stop, rather than a campaign building toward a reveal. Nothing about the sequence asks the listener to wait for a bigger moment.

Jimmy Jam Is Playing the Organ, and That Is Not a Cameo

The personnel list contains a detail that is easy to skim past. Jimmy Jam — half of Jam & Lewis, one of the most decorated producers in American pop — appears on this record as a session organist.

Kiwanuka is blunt about the scale of it: “All the Hammond you hear, other than maybe one song, is Jimmy Jam. He’s on essentially a lot of the record.”

Engaging a producer of that stature to play rather than to produce is an unusual inversion, and it fits the record’s logic. A Hammond part is a texture decision, and having one player make all of them is how an album gets a consistent character without layering.

He is not the only heavyweight in a supporting role. Pino Palladino plays bass, James Gadson drums, James Payne slide guitar; Rosie Danvers arranged the strings with Pete Anthony conducting, and six named backing vocalists appear. Kiwanuka himself plays acoustic, electric and bass guitar, drums, piano and Wurlitzer, with Inflo on drums, piano, keyboards, Rhodes and synthesiser.

Kiwanuka also plays a great deal of the record himself, which is the other half of the same idea. When the person who wrote the song is the one playing the Wurlitzer part, the arrangement decisions and the writing decisions stop being separate stages that need reconciling.

The Reception Was Warmer Than the Modesty Suggests

Stripping back is usually the move that costs an artist their reviews. It did not here.

The album took a Metacritic score of 83. The Observer gave it five stars and called it “an exquisite return”; DIY and Uncut both went to four and a half; The Independent, Mojo and NME to four; Clash and The Line of Best Fit to 8 out of 10, the latter calling it “a beautifully crafted return”. Pitchfork was the coolest of the majors at 7.0, and AllMusic sat at three and a half.

Commercially it reached number two in the UK and number one in Scotland, with number two in the Netherlands, five in Flanders, six in Switzerland, eleven in Germany and fifteen in Austria. Those are not the numbers of a retreat.

Why the Experiment Worked

The reason a record made with “nothing to prove” did not simply sound smaller is that the restraint was applied to the arrangement and not to the ambition.

Everything expensive is still present — a legendary rhythm section, real strings, a full choir of backing vocals. What changed is that those elements take turns instead of stacking. That is a harder record to make than a dense one, because every part left in has to justify itself against the silence it is displacing.

It is the same instinct as a stable studio partnership: fewer new variables, more attention to each one. Our piece on why guitar bands went back to tracking live covers a related move, from a different direction.

Small Changes is out now.

By Will Lisil / August 6, 2026