Jeff Bridges has had his share of epiphanies, but few arrived as accidentally as Slow Magic 1977–1978, a lost-and-found record of '70s-era songs rescued from cassette hiss and artistic amnesia. “I didn’t even know it was an album,” Bridges tells me. “I thought it was this rough thing, filled with clams.” The kind of thing you bury in a shoebox, not press on vinyl for Record Store Day. But thanks to producer Keefus Ciancia (his partner on the Sleeping Tapes), the old tapes made it to Light in the Attic Records—who promptly fell in love with every imperfection. “I signed off on it being done and it just proved to be so much fun,” he grins. “It connected me with all these old friends from 50 years ago.”
It started with a rule: no songs allowed. Back in 1977, vibing with his buddy Steve Bame in a haze of Wednesday night jams, the motto was pure improv. “Singing and improvisation were encouraged,” Bridges recalls. “But no pre-written stuff. Still, I’d take what came up at the jam and go home and write songs inspired by it.” Songs like “Obnoxious,” with its "wider shade of pale" vibe, were born this way—equal parts doo-wop progression and jam session residue.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Jeff Bridges project without a little cosmic misdirection. “I look at all the creative things I do—acting, music, painting—the task is to get out of the way and let this thing come through you and do you,” he says. “There’s nothing sweeter than that.” Slow Magic isn’t polished. It isn’t perfect. But it’s the kind of album that Paul McCartney might call a miracle of memory—something your younger self gifts you later, like a postcard from someone you used to be.
The album even includes a poem by Burgess Meredith, who sounds suspiciously like William Burroughs on tape. “Isn’t that a beautiful poem?” Bridges beams. “He asked me, ‘Mind if I recite a poem?’ First take, man.” The pair had bonded years earlier on The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go, a film so strange that James Mason plays a Chinese-Mexican. “Very bizarre movie,” Bridges deadpans.
There’s also a cut called “Kong,” inspired by an abandoned King Kong sequel that Bridges tried to pitch to Dino De Laurentiis. “What if the ape falls off the tower and it’s a machine?” he says. “And Chuck Grodin buys the carcass and takes it around the country. Then the aliens come back for it.” Dino passed. So Bridges wrote a song about it instead.
As for the future, it’s anyone’s guess. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with me musically,” Bridges says, gesturing toward a guitar that’s always within reach. “I’ve been playing Leonard Cohen lately… just letting it kind of have its way with me.” He says it like a guy who never tries to force anything—which is exactly the point. Jeff Bridges doesn’t chase projects. He avoids them. “I resist life to a great degree,” he laughs. “I know what it entails. It means I can’t be with my family, can’t make music, can’t paint. I say no a lot. Even to movies I want to do.”
Take Crazy Heart, for example. “Scott Cooper sent me the script years before it came out. I loved it, but there were no songs. And that was a problem.” Exit dream. Enter T-Bone Burnett. “I run into T-Bone on the street and he asks me about it. I say, ‘There’s no music.’ He says, ‘That’s the easy part. I’ll do it if you do it.’ And I go, ‘Oh no, now I have to do it.’” Suddenly it’s real. And terrifying. And, of course, award-winning.
Even when he is all in, he’s not chasing the spotlight. He’s just trying to get picked… which brings us to Bob Dylan. Yes, that Bob Dylan.
Bridges had a role in Masked and Anonymous, the delightfully strange 2003 film that was essentially Dylan doing Dylan in a dystopian fever dream. “Not many people saw that movie,” Bridges admits. But for him, it came with one of the greatest perks of his life. “Bob knocks on my trailer door and says, ‘Hey, you wanna pick?’” Bridges’ voice still sounds awestruck. “And I’m like… what? My hands were shaking.”
So there they sat. Jeff Bridges and Bob Dylan, trading songs. “I played one from my old buddy John Goodwin,” he says, referencing the lifelong friend whose music has often made its way into Bridges’ sets with his band The Abiders. “And then I played ‘You Belong to Me’—Bob’s version of it. Just him on guitar. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
It’s the kind of moment you can’t plan, and probably couldn’t repeat. But Bridges doesn’t try to. He’s not trying to make magic anymore. He just lets it happen.
And Slow Magic? That’s what it sounds like when it does.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
