The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I am trying to make something sublime’
John Legend has sung for Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama – and a billion people on YouTube. Now, he tells Bernadette McNulty, he wants to use his voice to heal America
As he wakes up on the morning after the US election, the American soul singer John Legend is subdued to say the least. “I’m a little disappointed,” he croaks down the line from his home in Beverly Hills. “We believed that the polls were close to accurate and we were pretty optimistic that Hillary would win. But boy, was I wrong.”
Legend’s disappointment is hardly surprising. Last month, the musician went out on the campaign trail for Clinton, playing a benefit concert in his home state of Ohio. Addressing the crowd at the Cincinnati rock club Bogart’s, he gave a forthright speech, criticising Donald Trump’s temperament, intelligence, and attitudes to minority groups and women.
“He doesn’t deserve to lead this country,” he said. “He doesn’t deserve to be elected dog-catcher in your local county.”
But gathered around the television on Tuesday night in the mansion he shares with his wife, the model Chrissy Teigen, and other friends, Legend began to realise the election wasn’t going to go Clinton’s way. “We knew we were in trouble when Michigan and Wisconsin went because they have been Democrat states for quite a while,” he says. “For those to even be in question was worrying.” His rousing speech in Ohio evidently fell on deaf ears – Trump took that state too.
“Trump ran a terrible campaign but some people voted for him because they didn’t care how terrible he was, they just wanted something different,” he says. “The key was the way he made working class white voters feel like he had their back. He sold them fear and bigotry and they bought it.”
Since he performed at Barack Obama’s first inauguration as president in 2009, Legend has become increasingly vocal on issues of social justice. He won an Oscar for his anthem Glory, which was used as the theme song for the 2014 Martin Luther King biopic Selma, and his new album, Darkness and Light, features songs about poverty and civil rights.
But Legend’s strident opinions are somewhat at odds with his reputation as one of his generation’s most romantic crooners. The son of a factory worker and a seamstress, Legend (whose real name is John Stephens) was a child prodigy who began playing the piano at four and became choirmaster at his local church, in Springfield, Ohio, at the age of 11. An A-grade student to boot, he graduated from high school at 16, and went from an Ivy League university to a job in management consultancy. After leaving the office, Legend would play the piano in bars at night, impressing singers such as Alicia Keys and Kanye West with his soulful voice and songwriting before going on to release his debut album, Get Lifted, in 2004. That record, which featured the Grammy award-winning single Ordinary People, turned Legend into a star. Its raw emotions and lush arrangements made it a bestseller, while critics praised its uplifting tone, one that stood in stark contrast to the negative and brutal tenor of rap music. Legend – whose stage name was given to him by fellow musicians who thought he sounded like a throwback to the “golden age” of soul – went on to make another three albums between 2006 and 2013, and enjoyed a smash hit two years ago with the romantic ballad All of Me, written for his wife. The video, which shows Legend and Teigen in various stages of undress, has so far had almost a billion hits on YouTube and Legend now has 10 Grammys to his name.