Leon Bridges Transcends Space and Time on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
It’s 11:30 PM on a Monday in July outside Basel, Switzerland. But inside Bar Car 3675 of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, clocks and calendars feel meaningless. Guests on the world’s most exclusive luxury train—still dressed in their black-tie finest from dinner—clink glasses of old-fashioned cocktails and espresso martinis against a backdrop of Art Deco decor. One group teaches new friends a card game from home; another debates international retirement policies. The mood is timeless, and no one is thinking about what comes next. That makes the appearance of Leon Bridges, the American singer-songwriter with a knack for modernizing retro soul, all the more surprising.
Bridges, accompanied by a backup singer and his own guitar, performs a lengthy set on board the Orient-Express, belting previous hits and brand-new songs from his upcoming album. When he plays “River,” the stirring song that shot him to stardom when it was included on the soundtrack for the first season of Big Little Lies, the train heads for the nearby French border. For a moment, everyone on board floats between both countries and eras.
Just four days earlier, Bridges had released the first four songs from his upcoming album Happiness Anytime. Like several other musicians this year, he feels a renewed sense of urgency surrounding music’s power to uplift. “There’s so much darkness in this world,” he says. “As artists, we have a responsibility to use our platform and use our art to empower.” While previous releases saw Bridges finding inspiration in vintage soul, this time around he’s using funk music and the Afrobeat tunes of Fela Kuti as his jumping-off point. Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto of the British band Jungle (perhaps best known Stateside for their viral hit “Back on ’74,”) were his main collaborators for the project. “I love reinventing myself with each album,” Bridges adds. “I love to them keep guessing, ‘What’s he going to do next?’ My last album, Leon, was a window into my heart. And this one is an embodiment of my joy.”
The next morning, Bridges is up early in L’Observatoire, the train’s most exclusive suite. Spanning the size of an entire car and designed by the French artist JR, it’s a modern vision that seamlessly blends the train’s heritage glamour. By this point, the Orient Express had already made a stop in Paris, and was now chugging along deep in the French countryside on its way to its next stop in Brussels. Bridges says he imagines the new album as an aural travel itinerary. “It really takes you to a place,” he says. “I tried to pull from Latin rhythms and traditional African culture while still making it my own thing. It’s almost full-circle, because one of Fela Kuti’s main inspirations was American soul music, James Brown and Funkadelic.”
“When I pack for a trip, I try to aesthetically embody the essence and spirit of wherever I’m going,” says Bridges, who notes he has a deep love for vintage fashion. That credo came in handy on the train, when he wasn’t aware of the black-tie dinner dress code until the last minute; still, he managed to pull together a Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket, a Palomo Spain lace top, and trousers by the Vietnamese-American designer LỰU ĐẠN for his evening look.
The next morning, he’s wearing wide-leg denim with a vintage velour quarter-zip. For this new record, he’s shifting his style slightly from his self-described “’70s, western, soul-man vibes” to something that reflects his recent inspiration. “I wanted to incorporate more patterns and vibrant colors,” he says. (His favorite place to source vintage pieces? eBay.)
A love of all things retro also drew Bridges to perform on the Belmond Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. His journey on board started in Venice, Italy before the final destination in Amsterdam, roughly 33 hours later. Although Belmond is known for its unique luxury hotels from Bali to Sicily, several Michelin-star restaurants, river cruises, and even safaris, the historic train is at the heart of the company’s origin story. Looking to drive visits to a hotel he owned in Venice, founder James Sherwood bought and restored out-of-commission cars from the original Orient Express line to transport guests from Paris and London to Italy in 1982. Several cars still in service date back to the late 1920s, and retain their original interior touches designed by René Prou, Gérard Gallet, and René Lalique. Over the years, the train has become a unique destination in its own right, especially as guests increasingly seek out slow travel and novel adventures (this was also part of the reason luxury conglomerate LVMH acquired the brand back in 2018).
There isn’t an explicit ban on smart phones aboard the train, but one might feel silly for using any other app than the camera to capture the views (or the occasional surprise musical performance). Bridges’s performance comes as the company seeks to form stronger bonds with wider culture. The JR-designed L’Observatoire suite includes a hidden library stocked with both curated literature and vinyl records. Guests in all suite cabins can read Writers on the Rails, a short story anthology inspired by Ottessa Moshfegh and R.F. Kuang’s own journey on the train. DJ Honey Dijon spun on the train back in 2024, and the company promises more shows in the future.
Bridges, for his part, says he thoroughly enjoyed his moment. “It’s a deep vibe in this setting. It’s really special.”
