‘Saturday Night Live’ music: Leon Bridges performs ‘Smooth Sailin”

This weekend, “Saturday Night Live” brought on the show as its musical guest someone who we consider to be one of music’s biggest up-and-coming stars in Leon Bridges. This is a real performer and musician, someone who doesn’t need backing tracks or vapid love songs to be interesting.

Interestingly, one of the things that we liked the most about Bridges was watching him performing. He made sure that from his hands to his feet, every part of his body was completely in tune with what he was doing. We’ve never heard “Smooth Sailin'” before, but we loved that it had a little bit of folk, soul, and New Orleans blues thrown in there. It was a lovely throwback performance that we’d love if “SNL” featured every week rather than some of the stuff that they do. Also great? Bridges’ band, who had an eclectic group of instruments out there in support of him.

We’ll have more on Leon’s second performance soon, so stay tuned!

Update: The second song of Bridges’ on the night was “River,” which was a track we enjoyed almost even more for its simple, almost soothing quality. Overall, we may say that Bridges had our favorite two-song set of the season; we know that Adele was sensational and is one of the best pure singers on the planet, but there is something to be said for going out there on the stage and allowing us  to go on a journey of discovery.

We’ll have some videos for Bridges’ performance hopefully in the morning, so stay tuned.

You can read our review of the full show hosted by Ryan Gosling by heading over to this link right away! Also, be sure to sign up now to get some more TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: NBC.)