“I’m not dressed for public consumption,” John Legend apologized, before turning on his Zoom camera. He was swathed in a floral-on-black robe, sitting outside of what looked like a tasteful villa: tiled roofs, cream-colored walls coated in ivy. Legend was three days into a family vacation in Lake Como, he told me. But I knew that already. The press had provided breathless coverage of his wife, the model/cookbook author/social-media maven Chrissy Teigen, and her pregnant belly. Teigen herself had given her thirty-nine million Instagram followers a closeup view of their Italian getaway: posing with Legend on a cobblestoned street; dressing up with their daughter, Luna; drifting on a boat with their son, Miles. Lake Como was where Legend and Teigen got married, in 2013, the same year that Legend burnished their power coupledom in his hit song “All of Me.”
It was early evening, Italian time, and Legend was coming off a long day of not much at all. “We’ve been just hanging out by the pool, eating good food, drinking good wine, and, yeah, just relaxing,” he said. He was so laid back that it was easy to forget that, when he isn’t playing Wife Guy and Instagram Dad, he’s one of the most successful musicians of his generation. He’s one of the youngest people, and the first Black man, to achieve the EGOT, and his honors also include the N.A.A.C.P. President’s Award and People’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” (SNEGOT?) When his first studio album, “Get Lifted,” came out, in 2004, he was twenty-six, but his expressive voice was an old soul’s, harking back to crooners such as Nat King Cole and Marvin Gaye. He’s been a tireless advocate for criminal-justice reform and other progressive causes, and his political convictions have been at the heart of a very public rift with his early producer and champion Kanye West, who supported Donald Trump before launching his own baffling Presidential run, in 2020.
Born in 1978, John Stephens renamed himself John Legend even before he had a record deal, in what he describes as a “bet on myself.” His eighth studio album, which comes out this week, embraces the wager: it’s titled, simply, “Legend.” We spoke about songwriting during a pandemic, his extremely online family life, the loss of his and Teigen’s expected third child, religion, President Biden’s crime policies, and what happened between him and Ye. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Legend” is a double album, with an Act I and Act II. How are they different?
The conversation I had with my team is that Act I was like Saturday night and Act II was Sunday morning. Saturday night is more about sensual pleasures, more about the party, more up-tempo. Sunday’s more introspective and intimate and spiritual.
You hear the fun and sensuality right away: the first song, “Rounds,” starts with the lines “Cotton candy fingertips / paint my lips.” So much of the conversation about, for instance, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” has been about getting people out dancing and being in their bodies together after so much isolation. Did you think about that?
Yeah. You’ll probably find, when people analyze this era of music, that all of us musicians were disconnected from the world in 2020. And then, as the vaccines were starting to come around and Biden gets elected, you just feel like the future’s going to be better, even though it’s not all the way there yet. A lot of people were, like, “Hey, let’s celebrate!” And that thread will probably be common through a lot of the music that was created over the past eighteen months.
Well, there’s been a kind of thwarted hedonism. Last summer was supposed to be “hot vax summer,” and then some variant comes around and spoils the vibe.
When I was writing “Waterslide,” it was last spring, and I was, like, “Oh, man, summer is going to be great!” [Laughs ruefully.]
One of the things you’re known for is political anthems, like “Preach” and “Glory.” Did you consciously want to shift back to love and sex and fun and feelings this time?
Yeah. I wanted to write about, like, celebrating us being able to see each other and touch each other again.
In Act II of the album, there’s a ballad about grief called “Pieces,” which has the line “we learn to live in pieces.” Where did that come from?
I’m someone who generally tends to write and perform songs that are optimistic. This song has some of that optimism—we’re going to get through this, we’re going to cope—but we’re not ever going to be the same as we were prior to this grief. I certainly felt that way after we lost our baby, in 2020. You learn to live with that grief and carry it with you. It doesn’t have the same weight and pain, but you’re never the same again.
There’s a line in “Pieces” that you repeat a couple of times: “Wasn’t it you who told me that grief was a teacher?” Was that a real conversation with someone? Who’s the “you”?
It wasn’t exactly a real conversation—there’s not a specific “you,” I’ll say that—but I felt like it worked for that place in the song, to say it that way.
Do you agree with that idea, that grief is a teacher?
Oh, absolutely. It’s an inevitable part of life, but it can be something that helps you. Particularly in my relationship with Chrissy, it made us stronger, going through this together, even though we were broken in some way by it, because we had to hold each other together and support each other through it. It’s a way of forging you, if you handle it the right way as a couple, and I think that’s what it did for us.
You and Chrissy were very open about the pregnancy loss, even sharing the name that you had chosen for your third child, Jack. What was the conversation like, on how much to talk about such a difficult and personal thing in public?
Chrissy felt like she needed to share it. Everyone knew we were pregnant. Everyone knew she was having challenges with the pregnancy even. It felt dishonest and weird not to acknowledge the fact that something happened. I was more reluctant, because I’m more guarded about sharing pain than she is. But, once she did it, I almost immediately saw the wisdom of her doing it. Not only was it the honest thing to do, what it did was open up more of a conversation among people who were afraid to share that kind of detail, who felt ashamed if they lost a pregnancy. We still meet people who thank Chrissy for sharing that, because they’ve gone through the same thing and it made them feel less alone.
In one sense, it has to do with being famous and having a pregnancy play out in the press. But, from the women in my life, I know there’s so much angst about what you share, when you tell people you’re pregnant—all these supposed rules—because if you lose the baby then you have to tell people that. But friends of mine have said, “Why do I have to keep any of this a secret and then suffer through it alone?”
Exactly. You’re allowed to grieve these other losses publicly. Everyone knows when one of your relatives dies, and you’re allowed to eulogize them. But, when something so tough and painful and tragic happens [with a pregnancy], a lot of people feel like they have to be quiet about it. I’m just glad Chrissy was bold enough and honest enough to break that taboo.
I was surprised when you just said that you’re more guarded about sharing pain, because you obviously do that through music, and a song like “Pieces” is sharing pain.
Sure. But I think it’s easier to do it through music than through Instagram.
As everyone knows, Chrissy is now pregnant—there are about five hundred headlines a day about her “baby bump”—which is wonderful news.
Yeah. Sometimes, after you lose a pregnancy and get pregnant again, you’re guardedly optimistic, because you never know if tragedy could strike again. But, at a certain point, everyone’s going to start speculating if they see her belly. We thought the time was right to let everyone know.
I have friends who’ve had really difficult miscarriages and then get pregnant, and in a way it’s bittersweet. It’s obviously very joyful, and you want to be full parents to this new person, but at the same time a new baby doesn’t exactly fill the hole of the one you lost. Are you sorting through those kinds of feelings?
Yeah. We don’t know anything about our new baby yet, so it’s hard to know how we’ll feel in the moment. I’m not anticipating filling the hole that we felt when we lost Jack. I just feel it’ll be a new person in our lives to love and to make our lives more joyful. We’ll still always carry some of that grief from Jack, but we’ll just keep living and loving and finding joy in life. And living in pieces. [Another rueful laugh.]
The only reason I feel remotely comfortable asking you about any of this is because you both live your family life so publicly—even your vacation right now. One of your lives is as John Legend, superstar musician, and another is as a character on Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram. Did that come naturally for you? Was that something that she had to cajole you into?
She’s more natural at it. She’s exactly the right age and temperament to be very fluent in the ways of Twitter and Instagram. She’s funnier than me. She’s prettier than me. I enjoy being a part of her photos and her public conversations, but I’m just not as good at doing it as she is.
Do you ever disagree about where the line is for sharing things?
Not really. Maybe years and years ago, when Twitter and Instagram were brand-new. It was just a different time for both of us. I was quite a bit more famous than she was. So, when she first got on Twitter, it wasn’t as Chrissy Teigen, Famous Person. I think she approached it with a little less caution back then. She sort of infamously got in trouble for things she said, like, ten years ago, but I think people were transferring the power she has now to those ten-year-old tweets. She’s aware of that power and knows how to wield it wisely now. She’s in control of her message and what she wants to say to people, and she does it in a smart and still really funny and relatable way.
How do you talk to your kids about being part of a very public family, being documented online? This is something that’s magnified by fame, but something every parent in the age of Facebook and Instagram thinks about.
We don’t really talk about social media with them. They know that we’re famous, and they know that not everyone’s parents do what we do. But I don’t feel like they understand anything about social media yet. I assume kids get these kinds of accounts when they become tweens or early teen-agers, and I’m scared! Who knows what app they’ll be using at that point. You just hope they’re wise and don’t do anything life-ruining with it. But, you know, thirteen-year-olds are going to be stupid sometimes, and obviously they’ll be under more of a magnifying glass than other thirteen-year-olds.
This seems, like, light-years away from your own childhood, in Springfield, Ohio.
Oh, massive difference. Well, we didn’t have the Internet back then. But my whole life was just so different. I never flew anywhere until I went to college. I never really left Ohio, aside from road trips to relatives’ houses in, like, Milwaukee or Durham, North Carolina. The extent of most of our travel was going to other people’s churches in Ohio. So just a completely different universe of opportunities. When I went to Penn, I felt in so many ways like an outsider: not having money, not having grown up on the East Coast, growing up in a very religious home.
Your family was incredibly wrapped up in the church.
The church was my family, and the family was my church. My grandfather led the church, and then, when he retired, my uncle did. My mom was the choir director. Their mother was the church organist—my grandmother. Pretty much all the leadership and music of the church came from my family. I was homeschooled for a lot of my early years, too.
Was that because your parents wanted more religion in your education?
Yes. I don’t know how familiar you are with the evangelical homeschool movement—
Oh, I’m a big New York agnostic Jew.
There you go! So, let me educate you! You’re more the demographic of the kids I went to Penn with. But, yeah, our church was a Black Pentecostal church, but a lot of the media that my parents consumed was from the white evangelical movement. They would listen to, like, James Dobson, Focus on the Family, on the local Christian radio. They enrolled us in a private school called Springfield Christian School that was very evangelical and conservative. And then, when they couldn’t afford to send us to private school anymore, they homeschooled us, but using the same curriculum from that Christian school. Then my parents got divorced, around what would have been my sixth-grade year. I was already a year ahead at that point. By the time I went to public school, they had me skip another grade, so I started eighth grade at the age of a sixth grader. By the time I got to college, I was only sixteen.
Obviously, your politics now are very different than what you grew up with. At some point, did you have a break with the church, with your family’s politics?
It’s weird, because Black Christians still tend to vote for Democrats. In some ways, you could call them liberal, but many are more conservative than a lot of other liberals about sexuality and some of these culture-war things. There’s quite a bit of resistance to abortion in the Black Christian community, too. We grew up in a particularly not libertine church. We were pretty strict about what women could wear and gender roles and any kind of rights or respect for gay people. However, I would guess that most of them still voted for Bill Clinton. At a certain point, I started to be more skeptical about the church’s teachings and about the hypocrisy that I would see, about the contradictions even within the Bible and how misguided I felt it was to take the text literally and try to live one’s life that way. Then I started to realize that I didn’t need religion to teach me how to be a good person and how to live a good life, and that, far too often, religion was being used as a way to control people, to humiliate people, to make people feel more powerful or less powerful.
Did this become a confrontation you had to have with your parents?
Not really. I think they know that I’m less religious than they are, but we haven’t had a heart-to-heart about me not really being religious anymore.
Your grandmother died in her late fifties, and it caused your mother’s life to really go off track. She had problems with depression and later on with addiction, left the family for around ten years, and was in and out of jail. What was your understanding at age twelve or thirteen or fourteen of what was going on?
My way of coping with it was to try to ignore it. We were living with my dad. We had lots of family around to protect us and support us. I tried to throw myself into school and music and other things to distract myself. I don’t know if that’s the best mental-health approach, but I was successful at, like, being the best student and staying busy with music and student council. She was living in the same town, but I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to see her deteriorating. I don’t know if I could have helped her—I was just a kid myself and trying to figure shit out and thrive, despite this major loss in my life. Not only did I lose my mom but I lost my grandmother, who was very influential for me. She’s the one who taught me how to play gospel piano.
And then at a certain point your mother remarried your father? How did this all end?
She kind of had a come-to-Jesus moment. My family and some of our friends came together and tried to rescue her, and it basically worked. She was able to kick her addiction. She was able to come back to our family. And she’s been a part of the family ever since, even though they’ve gotten divorced since then, and my dad’s remarried to another woman. Nobody’s perfect, but she’s come a long way from that time, and is very present with her entire extended family.
As a young man, did you struggle with forgiving her for being so absent?
Yes. We all did—all four of us as kids and my father, too. You never forget that loss that you felt and this huge gap in your life where she wasn’t there. But I really do believe I’ve forgiven her, and I really want my kids to enjoy their grandparents and all the love that they get from her. It’s still part of my history and part of what made me who I am, but I believe I’ve forgiven her.
While all this was happening, you went to Penn and graduated magna cum laude, and were also playing piano for Lauryn Hill and in an a-cappella group. And you were younger than everyone else in college. How did you keep yourself on the straight and narrow?
As much as I’m talking about the loss that I felt from my mother disappearing from our lives, she was also extremely hands-on prior to that, and in some ways she helped prepare me to be an overachiever. I was a spelling-bee champion, and she would teach us phonics and math. She was very hands-on as a teaching mother before that, and so that helped. And there were enough people in my life who didn’t want me to slip through the cracks as well, like counsellors, teachers, who saw my potential and wanted to make sure I didn’t fuck it up, basically.
In college, how developed were you musically?
Gospel was first in my life, because that was the music that was played the most at my home. We were quite sheltered from current popular music until I was about eleven or twelve. I was born in ’78, and I knew who Michael Jackson and a couple of other major stars were, but I basically missed the eighties, culturally. By the nineties, I was pretty tuned in to what was going on in Black music—all the male groups like Jodeci and Boyz II Men, all the New Jack Swing like Teddy Riley, R. Kelly. That era when hip-hop and R. & B. started to fuse. Once I got to college, I got much more into hip-hop as well—the Fugees and stuff like that. But my dad also loved Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis, that Black-crooner vibe. And then I always loved Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. My mom played quite a bit of Luther [Vandross] and Whitney [Houston], the modern popular R. & B. artists of that time. So that whole range was in my head by the time I started making my own records.
One of the most surprising parts of your life story is that you spent three years as a management consultant.
Yeah, it’s quite a weird detour!
Were you good at it?
I was pretty good. I could have been better, but I was genuinely determined to try to get a record deal. I spent a lot of energy and lost a lot of sleep focussing on my side hustle as a musician.
What kind of stuff were you working on?
One of our cases was helping a pharmaceutical company assess the market for gastrointestinal drugs—a lot of market research and presentation-writing and number-crunching. Not sexy at all. But that part of my brain worked pretty well, and I was able to do it. I needed the job, but I was, like, I want to be out of here in a year. It took three years, and even then I had to work a bit before I was able to live off the money I was making from music.
How close were we to the alternate universe where there’s a John Stephens, management consultant?
There was a decent chance of that happening! Think of how many musicians who want to be where I am just never make it. Think of how hard it is to get a record deal. Think of how hard it is, once you get a record deal, for your album to even come out. Think of how hard it is for an album to come out and catch on like “Get Lifted” did. All those things happening are extremely lucky. It’s a bit less difficult to climb the ranks as a management consultant. But I was determined for that not to be my future.
Well, you were calling yourself John Legend even before “Get Lifted” came out, so it couldn’t have been a complete surprise.
That was, like, a bet on myself—taking on this rather presumptuous name.
Fake it till you make it?
Kind of. It was a nickname that a guy named J. Ivy started calling me. I met him while we were working on “The College Dropout” with Kanye. He started calling me the Legend, because I reminded him of some of the artists we grew up listening to, and he heard the ancestors in my voice. That morphed into John Legend, and he and Kanye and a bunch of the other people around us were, like, “Man, that’s a stage name, John. You should go with that!” I had already been performing around New York and Philly as John Stephens. I was selling my CDs on my Web site, john-stephens.com.
What happens if I go there right now?
I have no idea, frankly.
Hold on.
Make sure you spell it with a “P,” “H.” Common mistake.
“The site can’t be reached.” It’s gone.
I figured that. But, yeah, all of that had been in place. I was closer and closer to getting a record deal, and I’d been working with Kanye for a while. When they started calling me that nickname, it was more our inner circle. But then Kanye started referring to me as that when he was introducing me to people: “Check out this artist I’ve signed! His name is John Legend.” I was, like, Fuck, how am I going to tell people to call me John Legend? I don’t even have a record deal yet! What if I’m a flop? I’m just going to bet on myself and spend all my energy trying to live up to this lofty stage name. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
When you became really famous very fast, was there a surreal moment when you stood back and said, “Holy shit, this is what being famous is”?
The first time I truly felt famous was the day my cell phone was called by two very famous people. One was Oprah Winfrey. One was Magic Johnson. Both called me on the same day and asked me to sing at events that they were throwing separately. I was, like, O.K., this is a new world that I’m living in.
Was there any sort of learning curve for fame?
Well, one of the things that made it easier was the fact that I was almost in an apprenticeship with Kanye. His album “The College Dropout” came out in February of 2004, and I became famous basically a year later. I was singing with him when we were opening for Usher and touring around Europe. So there were a lot of things that may have felt new to me if I hadn’t experienced that, because I was right there when it was happening for him.
While we’re on Kanye—over the past month I’ve read so many headlines about you and him. I did listen to your recent interview on “The Axe Files.” You said, basically, that your friendship became strained because of the direction he took politically, but that kind of got recycled through the tabloids.
Yeah, what it got described as was, we stopped being friends because he supported Trump, which was a mischaracterization of what I said. That was kind of the Rupert Murdoch version of the story—it was all over the New York Post and Fox News. What I was saying was that he was very upset with me that I didn’t support him running for President, and that was the real impetus for us having a strain in our friendship. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but he was very upset with me that I didn’t support him and I supported Joe Biden. It’s up to him whether he can get past that. [West could not be reached for comment.]
There’s the famous-person drama to this, but on another level I feel like this has happened to everyone over the past six years—everyone has some friend or relative who’s gone off the rails politically or become too distant politically to communicate with.
I don’t feel like politics should be everything in your relationships, and your relationships with people shouldn’t only be determined by who they voted for. But I do believe that certain things you believe in are indicators of your character, and obviously that will affect your friendships. I mean, what are friendships? If they’re not your blood relatives, in many ways they’re defined by your impression of that person’s values and whether or not there’s some level of compatibility with the way you see the world. We’re so online these days, and the fights we’ve had over the past six years on Twitter, particularly around Trump, kind of made politics everything for a lot of people. I don’t want to live a life that’s so consumed by politics that it’s the sole determinant of who can be my friend and who can’t. But values matter and character matters and moral compass matters.
At some point you reached out to him about his support of Trump, and he shared your texts on Twitter.
Exactly. Everyone saw how I talked to him about it. I talked to him with love and with empathy, and tried to help him see another way of looking at things. And obviously he went the way he went with it. The most frustrating thing about his run for the Presidency for me was how much it was an operation run by the Trump campaign. I don’t know how aware he was of the fact that there was so much Trump personnel throughout his campaign, raising money for him, getting petitions signed for him, getting him on the ballot. I saw their work on his behalf as a clear scam and an operation to try to siphon Black votes away from Biden, so there was no way I was going to support it. Kanye was upset with that, and we haven’t been friends since, really.
Again, this reminds me of conversations I’ve had. It’s so hard to tell people, “I think you’re being scammed.” Did that experience of trying and failing to reach him teach you anything about how we talk to people across the political divide?
Yeah, I don’t know. Clearly, I haven’t been successful in that particular regard! Most of my political work has been about encouraging people who are already inclined to think close to where I am to go out and vote and get involved. I don’t know how you persuade someone who believes differently than you do. And some of those beliefs are really strongly held. I have a lot of religious people in my life, for instance, and it’s hard to know how to convince someone when it feels like you’re speaking in an entirely different language.
Or, like everyone says, if you’re getting your news from completely different places and you have different facts, where do you start?
Right. There are these massive organizations who play to a specific audience, and they create their own realities. Up is down, right is left. It’s completely an alternate universe in some of these media echo-spheres, and I don’t know how you penetrate it.
We’re in a very confusing political moment now. People seem to think that the Democrats are getting some wind at their backs before the midterms. But, at the same time, this is a moment of backlash against so many progressive movements of the last couple of years, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or #MeToo.
Yeah, it’s confusing, partly because the backlash is real. We’ve seen all this anti-C.R.T., all this aggressive censorship in the libraries and in our schools—which is obviously cancel culture at its apex, but all by the people who claim to be against cancel culture. We’re seeing massive rollback to women’s rights, particularly in the Dobbs decision. I think, though, they’ve overplayed their hand. They’re forcing women to carry a child even if they’ve been raped. They’re staging an insurrection and trying to destroy our democracy and taking away people’s right to vote. They have made it so that there’s a much stronger chance that Democrats will retain control of the legislature in 2022. The choice they’re making very clear for us is between democracy and fascism, and God help us if we choose fascism.
One of the major causes you’ve been involved in is criminal-justice reform and mass incarceration. Was there a personal reason you were drawn to this issue?
It came out of me seeing the effects of mass incarceration on my family, and how hard it was for people to reintegrate. When I was growing up, I just thought that was the way life was. I didn’t think about the policy choices that went into us becoming the most incarcerated country in the world. And I read more and more about it and became angry about it, frankly, and decided that I wanted to commit a bunch of my energy to trying to reverse that and making decisions in the other direction, where we decarcerate, where we decriminalize, where we summon our societal resources toward things that are more constructive for our communities: investing in our schools, investing in health, investing in our neighborhoods rather than in more jails, more prisons, and more police.
How do you think the Biden Administration is doing on that issue? The White House released the Safer America Plan in July, which got mixed reviews from the justice-reform community.
I think Biden got spooked by the whole “defund” movement and has tried in every way to distance himself. Biden has always been very pro-police, and a thread throughout his career has been putting more money into policing, crime bills. I just disagree with him on the policy choices he’s made in those areas. But, like I said before, I think it’s important that we’re investing in the health and wealth of our communities, and I do think he’s been doing a good job of doing that—but he’s decided that we also need to spend a lot more money on police, even though we spend so much money on jailing and policing, and we have more people locked up than anybody. And it’s not making us the safest place in the world.
Where do you see the momentum on this issue?
People like myself who’ve been advocating for justice reform have helped move the conversation. But there was definitely a backlash, and all that stuff has been experienced during a time when murders went up during the pandemic. That is a real thing that happened, and I can understand why people may have been more afraid and decided that the best solution was to reverse all of the gains we’ve made when it comes to justice reform. But I don’t believe that’s the solution, and I don’t believe justice reform was the cause for the uptick during the pandemic. The pandemic was the cause for it, and all the dislocation and trauma and unemployment and homelessness.
You’ve said that as an activist you “put a sympathetic face on some radical actions.” That seems like a lot of work—to be appealing as an artist, appealing as an Instagram Dad, but also pushing how people feel politically. Does it ever feel constricting?
No! It feels honest. The artists who feel like they can’t talk about what they believe, they’re probably more stressed than I am—they’re afraid they’re going to lose fans. I don’t feel that fear. I say the things that I’m passionate about and I believe in, and it feels liberating. This is who I want to be in the world. ♦
