At Toastmasters International (the non-for-profit organisation dedicated to Public Speaking), the first speech every new member must take is called The Icebreaker Speech. In this speech, the topic is yourself, and you can go as superficial or as deep as you’d like, needless to say the best speeches don’t rattle off the list of subjects you studied at school. Rather, the best speeches reveal the telling facts of one’s life in a way that leave you with an understanding of who the speaker is. The best speeches have a sense of an emerging narrative, as opposed to an imposed narrative that is usually self-serving. It’s the difference between a textured novel and an obituary. This is very hard to accomplish in 5 mins. It takes Leon Bridges 4 minutes and 9 seconds in the song Georgia to Texas.
This emerging narrative is delivered to our ears via the blues – a genre that prides itself on its verisimilitude. More so than any other genre, the blues song states its case without pretence or duplicity. Indeed, a blues singer would give you the same performance whether he was singing to himself or to a crowd of thousands.
Listen to how the instruments ‘speak’ to us on Leon’s behalf. The double bass signals at the beginning of the song “Leon is about to tell you something deep, I’d listen to him if I were you”, the piano tells us with clarity that Leon is telling us the “God-honest truth, I swear”. The saxophone communicates Leon’s “irresistible world-weariness”. And finally the drums create a beautiful canvas for Leon’s story, for note that no 4-bars of drums are the same, just as in life the rhythm of life is never exactly the same when you pay attention.
It’s fascinating to hear this song, having heard and written about Lisa Sawyer. The record Good Thing is a darker album, exploring more complex human emotions than Coming Home. In this sense, the song is the conceptual counterpoint to Lisa Sawyer, following a similar structure, a similar road, but travelling in different directions, and yet still ending up in roughly in the same place – an appreciation of the scope and scale of Leon’s mother’s life.
At Toastmasters, you can give your icebreaker speech again when you are older and wiser. Consider this Leon Bridge’s second icebreaker speech.
poetic reverb 