Jeff Bridges Is Digging It

The interior of Jeff Bridges’s garage, in Santa Barbara, California, has the ramshackle ease of an extravagant dorm room: a tiger-print rug, a potter’s wheel, guitars, a rogue toothbrush, taped-up printouts of ideas he finds provocative or perhaps grounding (“Enlightenment is a communal experience”), and piles of books, from Richard Powers’s “Bewilderment” to “Who Cares?! The Unique Teaching of Ramesh S. Balsekar.” A black-and-white portrait of Captain Beefheart, incongruously dressed in a jacket and tie, hangs on a wall near an electric piano. When I arrived, on a recent afternoon, I did not take note of a lava lamp, but its presence didn’t feel out of the question. A salty breeze rustled some loose papers. Bridges was wearing rubber slides and a periwinkle-blue cardigan. He excitedly spread out a large furry blanket on a recliner and invited me to sit down: “Your throne, man!” he said.

Earlier this month, Bridges released “Slow Magic, 1977-1978,” a series of songs he recorded when he was in his late twenties, an emergent movie star, and involved in a regular Wednesday-night jam session with a coterie of musicians and oddballs from the west side of Los Angeles (the jams were organized by Steve Baim, who attended University High School with Bridges; they took place in various beach houses and, occasionally, at the Village, the recording studio where, around the same time, Fleetwood Mac was making “Tusk”). “Slow Magic” is great and also bonkers. On “Kong,” Bridges recounts a story line he pitched for a potential “King Kong” sequel (in 1976, Bridges starred as the long-haired primatologist Jack Prescott in a “Kong” remake produced by Dino De Laurentiis); the track features animated narration from the actor Burgess Meredith, and its lyrics are centered on the revelation that Kong is actually a robot. “It’s a sad story, but he was just a monkey machine!” Bridges wails in a tottering falsetto. (The idea was rejected.) On “Obnoxious,” a weirdly tender song about feeling sad and having a stomachache (“I went to the bathroom / And threw up”), there are echoes of Frank Zappa and the Band. Sometimes one also senses the influence of quaaludes.

What I like most about the record is how social it feels: friends in a room, being dumb, intermittently (even inadvertently) doing something miraculous. “When recording technology kept improving, I said, ‘Oh, I don’t need anybody! I can do this all by myself,’ ” Bridges told me, leaning back in a lawn chair. “That was kind of a trap, because even just reading the instructions took me out of the creative thing. I did some stuff that way, and it was fun, but it got me out of playing with live musicians.”

Bridges is affable, generous, enviably mellow. We watched YouTube, ate salad by his pool, and talked for several hours about art and love, and the funny ways they occasionally overlap. “Slow Magic” is available on vinyl for the first time this weekend, for Record Store Day, via Light in the Attic Records. This conversation has been condensed and edited.

When Matt Sullivan, a co-owner of Light in the Attic, first sent me the album, he called it “surreal.” I remember thinking, I’ve heard some pretty out-there records. I was very cocky about its potential weirdness! Then I put it on, and, man—I’ve never heard anything like this before.

That’s great to hear! That’s what we like—fresh, right? Fifty years old and fresh! A couple years ago I had cancer, and then I had COVID, and the COVID made the cancer look like nothing. Chemo had stripped me of my immune system. I was right at the door, you know? People didn’t know if I was gonna make it. And I thought, Hey, look, Jeff, you’re seventy-three. Do you have the juice to go in and polish all these tunes that you have? Why not just put ’em out? There’s so much content now, or whatever they call it—in one sense, it’s kind of a good thing, because everything becomes less precious. So I thought, Well, this kind of bookends the whole thing. This release is in the same spirit as the Wednesday-night jams.

In the past, you’ve released music that feels a little more conventional, or at least more tethered to genre. But you’ve also done a few things that fall somewhere in between the more produced Americana of, say, “Be Here Soon,” an album you made with Michael McDonald and David Crosby, and the very wild psychedelia of “Slow Magic.” I’m thinking of the “Emergent Behavior” series, on your website, where you pair these fairly raw acoustic songs with some trippy visuals.

The phrase “emergent behavior” came to my attention when I made this movie called “Living in the Future’s Past,” about our environment and global warming. It’s not so much pointing fingers at the bad guys. What we wanted to do was to address the question: Why are we behaving this way, when we know what’s going on?

Well, that’s sort of the big human question: Why do we do things that we know are bad?

It’s so interesting, you know? Emergent behavior is the principle of a superorganism. The murmuration of birds, for instance. You see the shape, how they all go like this. [Bridges swoops his hand to one side.] Now why are they making that shape and not some other shape? So then there’s the superorganism of humanity—we’re all on this planet, and we’re not doing that, we’re doing this. Why? One of the aspects of emergent behavior is that if you take one of the small organisms that make up the superorganism, it will tell you nothing about the superorganism. It won’t tell you anything about the why. So there’s something goin’ on that we’re not privy to. And that gives me a very hopeful feeling. These mysteries happen. You might experience this as a writer, where it’s doing you instead of you doing it. That’s the sweet spot, isn’t it?

But what is that? Is that . . . God?

Certainly. The God who is unutterable. You put a name on it and it becomes the golden calf, you know? It’s not any of your concepts—it’s something outside of that. When creativity is going down, you acknowledge that, and you try to get out of your own way. You’ve got to let the ego just go sit on the bench, and just hear what wants to be done through you. Man, talking about getting out of the way—another person who is so responsible for “Slow Magic” is this guy, Keefus Ciancia. I met Keefus through T Bone Burnett. He was a player on the album I did with T Bone. We became fast friends. It’s interesting, in life—you have all these opportunities that you’re offered, and you either take ’em or you don’t. It’s so interesting, isn’t it?

It’s actually the only interesting thing.

I’m thinking of a Leonard Cohen song. Are you a fan of Leonard Cohen?

Of course.

Do you know the song “Waiting for the Miracle”? Isn’t that a great song? Like, we’re waiting for that silver bullet when the miracle is here, baby! It’s right here! So this new album, this fifty-year-old album that’s about to come out, is the same kind of thing. Every once in a while life seems to invite me to do something off-kilter, and I just can’t help it. I’m drawn to it. Anyway, Keefus calls me up a little while later, years later, and he says, “Say, do you want to go into a studio? Just bring some of your tunes and see what happens?” So I brought this little cassette from the seventies, and he loved it. Without telling me, Keefus sent it to Light in the Attic, and they wanted to make an album. I said, “What, they want to redo these?” “No, no! Just put it out.” I said, “You’re kidding me! It’s just full of clams! It’s so rough.”