John Legend

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. John Legends one of those people who can brighten a day, so we're lucky during these times to be getting some new music. Rick wanted to talk to an uplifting artist for the podcast and John was one of the first people that came to mind, and the timing was perfect because John just released Actions, a song off his new album that's due later this year. Rick and John are both sheltered in place at the moment while we arrived this virus out. You probably saw John's living room concert with his wife, Chrissy Tigue in this past week, so we connected with John via zoom. So the first time we've really done a remote recording like this for the podcast, but it was a nice trial run since we'll likely be doing a lot more of this in the future, and since it's our first go at it. You'll probably hear some kids crying in the background, and this episode's definitely a lot shorter than usual, But when John's album comes out later this year, we'll definitely try to get him back on In the meantime, joyed this conversation between Rick and John Legend. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond, here's Rick Rubin and John Legend. What's happening, Rick, How are you feeling. I'm feeling great. How are you good? It's nice to see you. My pleasure. Are you in Malibu? Were probably really close to each other. I'm in Hawaii? Actually, Oh wow, Okay, so we're very far from each other. Yes, it's a interesting We've been doing these podcasts now for I don't know about a year and a half, and I've never done one this way. They've always been in person. Okay, well, this is going to be a new new experience for both of us into the wave of the present. Absolutely not the future. So do you remember your first memories of music as a kid. Yeah, my first memory of music as a kid. We're in church. I grew up in the Pentecostal church in Springfield, Ohio. My grandfather was the pastor of our church. My grandmother was the church organist, and my mother directed the choir, and my dad sang in the choir and played the drums, and so I would go to a choir rehearsal with my parents and hang out with them and with my grandmother, and I would be at church every Sunday and sometimes during the week, and we were surrounded by gospel music all the time. My parents played it on their record player at home and eventually their cassette player, and you know, we were immersed in it, and that was the primary source of music for us. Would you say the church came first and the music followed, or is it primarily a musical church. I would say they were so integrated that you couldn't separate one from the other when you went to our churches, any of the Pentecostal churches that I attended, or that I or the one I grew up in. Music was so integral to the service that you couldn't imagine the service without music. When's the first time you remember playing in front of people. I think probably the first time I sang in front of anyone who was probably like a Christmas program at school. They would try out the little kids to say their little pieces and sing a little song. And I was probably five, maybe four or five, probably not too far from the age my daughter is now. She's almost four, but I was probably a little bit older than that, but not much older. And you know, you don't know what you're doing at that time, but it's part of how you celebrate Christmas as part of how you interact with each other at church. And then I remember one of the first real productions I was in was a Christmas play at my elementary school. I um, for part of my elementary school years attended a Christian school called Springfield Christian School, and some of the time I was homeschooled as well, but for the time that I was there, I was a participant in some of the Christmas musicals and other, you know, little productions at the elementary school would do. And then was there a was there a moment in time where you decided to make it a profession or did it happen organically? Well, it started happening early, so um, you know, I would watch Star Search, and I would watch the Grammys, and I would watch Solid Goal, Old and Soul Trained, and I would see artists who were seemingly enjoying themselves, doing what they love to do and performing in front of large audiences. And I wanted to be one of those artists. I loved singing at church, but I wanted to be one of the artists I saw on television. I would see Stevie Wandering, Michael Jackson, Luther, you know, certain artists caught my attention. Aretha Franklin caught my attention and made me want to be in the stages, on the stages where they were performing, and so I dreamt of being here. Very early in my life. I didn't know what that meant. You know, to me, that meant winning Star search. Funny that I'm on the Voice now, but but you know, to me at the time, it meant winning a television talent show and getting discovered that way. So after church, the next your next connection to music was more through television. You would say, yeah, television, the radio, um, But you know when I when I would see those artists on television, it would kind of put kind of meat and bones on this idea of what it meant to be a professional artist. It would, you know, it gave me a visual representation of what that meant, and not just singing it for free at church or or singing it locally at school, but doing it for a living and doing it on big stages. Television was what kind of introduced me to what that meant. Do you do you remember when or if when you notice that the the difference between the music that was particular to the church and non church music. Oh yeah. My parents made it clear that secular music actually wasn't really welcomed in our home. So we didn't have like almost any secular recordings in our home at the time, even though we'd see some things on television we when we were young. My parents were very strict about those kinds of things, so we didn't have any secular music recordings at home. When I got a little older, things got a little more relaxed and my parents went through we're going through a divorce, and so they got a little more relaxed too, and so a lot of the kind of strict, really fundamentalist traditions that they were cleaving too for a long time, they kind of relaxed them a bit by the time we were ten, eleven, twelve years old, and and then he started to realize, Oh, my dad loved Motown, he loved the Ojas, he loved my mom loved Luther Vandrows. These are artists that they loved, but they didn't really like let on that they loved it because it was in our church tradition kind of frowned upon to listen to secular music. It's piano, your first instrument, my first and only I faked playing guitar on La La land. I learned enough to fake it, and uh, that was other than that. Pianos all I have. And when did your relationship with piano begin? Which started very young. We had a piano in my house, and like I said, my grandmother was a church organist, and so she would show me things on both the organ and piano, mostly piano. She had a piano and organ at her house too, and you know, I was there was not many homes that I would go to that didn't have a piano in my life. So my neighbor next door had a piano. My grandmother, my grandmother's on both sides had pianos, and we had a piano. It was a beat up, upright piano. Do you remember your first experiments with songwriting? Well, I started taking piano lessons formally at a music store when I was about four or five years old, and I learned like classical and hymns and things like that, and then I think I probably started writing around eight or nine years old. I would write things that I could sing at church. I would By the time I was ten or eleven, I was, you know, into girls more. By that point I started writing songs that I could sing to girls that I liked. And so between singing to Jesus and singing to girls that those are my prompts for writing. It was always from a place of passion. Exactly. Do you remember the first music that really spoke to you, um, outside of church, music that we you feel like um was foundational for you, that you would say was your music I loved. Well, there was music that my parents playing that I loved, um um so um. At a certain point, they once they kind of relaxed, uh, the restrictions on sycling music. You know, my mom would play. She would play like kind of modern R and B, like Whitney and Luther and Anita Baker, and my dad was more into, like I said, motown and the OJ's and stuff like that. And so my upbringing as a younger child was a combination of gospel music and current R and B and then classic you know, soul. And then once I started developing a consciousness in my own and and actively buying my own records, I was really into New Jack Swing. So, you know, I was in middle school around the time like Bell biv de Vaux was out, I was in high school when Boys to Men was big, and Joe to See and R. Kelly and a lot of those artists that were kind of fusing hip hop and R and B in what were at the time interesting new ways. Mary j came out when I was in high school, and I loved some of the motown stuff like Stevie and Marvin. But the stuff that we talked about at school, that me and my friends were into and excited about in high school was the new stuff that was out, and a lot of that for us was that new Jack swing sound. What was going on in hip hop at that time in hip hop, I wasn't that into hip hop until I went to college. I didn't really get into hip hop in the early nineties. I started to get into it much more in the mid to late nineties. But you know, I think Biggie came out in like the early nineties, Snoop came out, you know, a lot of the like the NWA type artists, Public Enemy. These are things my friends will listening to. But I wasn't that into hip hop until I got a little bit older. Where do you go to school. I went to college at UPenn in Philadelphia, and so I get to Philly, and this was a formative time in my life too. I get to Philly right when the Roots are really kind of running the scene there musically, but they're also working with you know, artists like DeAngelo, common Erica Bado, all these arts are not from Philly, but they would come to Philly to work with the Roots, and James Poyser and these other cats that were producing and recording there. Jill Scott was coming from I'm Philly, Jaguar, Balal music, Soul Child. All this stuff was happening while I was in college. And so in college, I was playing at a church UM every Sunday to help pay my bills, and then uh, during the week, you know, I was singing in an a cappella group UM on campus. But I was also going to different open mics and things like that. They had a thing called Black Lily UM. I don't know if you remember that, but this was like an open mic that the that the Roots and the jazzy fat Nasties would host UM and you'd see Jill Scott there, you see Balal, there, you see Jaguar, there, you see all these different artists. They started UM doing it at Wilhelmina's um and then they moved it to the five spot and you would see all of this music being made um and it was amazing and it was exciting to be a witness to it. I didn't have any Philly roots at the time. I was just going to school there, so I wasn't that connected to the local artists scene at that time. But I just started to go to these events and observe and be inspired by what they did. And then I think between that and meeting Lauren Hill in ninety eight through one of the singers that was singing in the choir at the church that I was playing for, all of those things kind of served as inspirations for me to really pursue being a solo artist and writing my own music and really making an earnest effort to be seen and heard by record labels, management and then eventually the world. All that started to happen while I was in college, while I was in Philly, while I was seeing all these other incredible artists doing their thing, it made me want to do it. And so at that time would you have been when you started pursuing it in that way? Did you make demo or did you go out and play? Yeah, So I started making demos when I was I graduated high school young. I was homeschooled some of my early years, and so I graduated high school on a sixteen and so I got to Penn when I was sixteen years old. I would lie by my age because I just didn't want to be the weirdo who was two years younger than everybody else. So I would lie and say my seventeen made a little younger, but you know it was it wasn't too big of a stretch anyway. I get there, I'm sixteen, and I'm figuring myself out what I want to do. I'm also, you know, going to class, doing a work study job, all these things. But people started to hear me sing our auditioned for this acapella group, and people loved my voice there, and I started to get a little bit of a reputation around campus as one of the better singers on campus. And so guys that were musicians or songwriters or producers would start to reach out to me and say, hey, you want to collaborate on some stuff together. I want to help you make a demo, I want to help you create some new songs. So one of the guys was a guy named Dave Tozer who was not a student at Penn, but he was living in Philadelphia and was friends with some of my friends at school, and so we met. Then. He plays a guitar, bass, producers and write songs, and we've been writing songs together since then. Were working on a project now and we've been writing together since probably in nineteen ninety seven nineteen ninety eight. There was another guy who was graduated from Penn, but he happened to be in the same acapella group that I was in, and he was producing and arranging for pop artists at the time. He was like arranging for Lisa Loebe and other artists that were popular at that time in the mid to late nineties, and he had seen me at one of our shows and was like, Oh, I really would love to work with you and write and produce with you. Then there was another guy you might might know. His name is Ted. He works with Snoop UM and he's from out He's from la and Uh. He manages Snoop now as part of Snoop's business team. But at the time he was just a student at Pen UH and he was rapping and producing as well. And UM, so all these different guys UM that I met at school that we're working on music and producing and writing and and we're like, hey, let's collaborate on some stuff. And so I started to put together a demo during that time, UM and UM. The first demo I created was with with Dan Coleman, and then the second one I created was with Dave tozer Um. But I was also collaborating with other producers and one of the producers I met was Veda Nobles who was working with Lauren Hill at the time UM and he worked on the Miss Education of Lauren Hill. I played piano on Everything Is Everything UH when I met Lauren Hill through one of my friends that was at the church that I was directing music at, and Lauren the day I met her asked me to play on the song that they were working on at that time, which was Everything Is Everything. Also auditioned for her band right after that to see if I could go on tour with her after the album came out. I didn't make the band, so I didn't drop out of school, but I would have, but then after that I graduate school. I have a couple different demos that I've made, and I keep working on new music, trying to get heard by different people, record labels, managers, etc. And I take a career detour and become a management consultant. It's kind of like almost peer peer pressure, because all my other friends were like applying to banks and consulting firms and accounting firms. And and one of my friends who was a year ahead of me at Penn, she had graduated and she was working at this place called Boston Consulting Group. And I was like, what do you guys do? And she explained what they did, and and you know, it seemed like a prestigious thing to do, and like something that really smart people should try to do. And so I applied and got an interview and got the job. And they offered me like fifty grand a year the first year out of school, which was a gargantuan amount of money for me at the time. My dad never made that much money in any year as a factory worker. And they offered me this money and this job at Boston Consulting Group in Boston, and I'm like, I'm gonna take it, of course, So I take it. I get frustrated living in Boston and asked them to transfer me to New York so I could be closer to the music scene there. And I moved to New York. I room with two guys. One of the guys was Kanye's cousin, and Kanye's cousin, his name is Davon Harris. He went to penn with me, and he was living in New York with another friend of mine, and they were living on Second Avenue between Seventh and Saint Mark's and they were working in different corporate jobs and they were like, do you want to come live with us when you moved to town? And I was like yeah. And so Devon is working during the day at Price Waterhouse, another consulting firm, and but at night he's like making beats and he's DJing a little bit. And then his cousin moves to town. His cousin, of course, is Kanye West. Kanye moves to Newark from Chicago, and this is right around I think he's the two thousand or two thousand and one. And in two thousand and one, September eleventh, the day the Blueprint came out, as you might recall, and that's jay Z's you know, really important album, and it was huge for Kanye's career and just Blazer's career because they had a lot of the beats on that album. And Kanye kind of starts to blow up as a producer. He just moved to Newark and was working in the hip hop scene in the Tri State area and his cousin Divan introduces the two of us and says, you guys should collaborate, and that time at Kanye he came to my show at Jimmy's Uptown in Harlem, and um, I was, you know, gigging doing you know, selling my demo out of my trunk of my car, playing my music for record label executives. And Kanye comes to the show and he says we should start working together, and we started working together. He was working on what eventually became The College Dropout. I would sing on a lot of the demos, and then I was working on what eventually became Get Lifted, and he made several of the beats that embodied uh that that were the you know, the tracks for the songs don't Get Lifted. And he eventually signed me to his production company, which became known as Good Music, and I signed through him to Columbia Records eventually in two thousand and four, but we had been working together for like two and a half years, and when his album College Dropout came out, it was like a huge moment. You know. He sold like four hundred thousand copies the first week. He was really becoming a real musical phenomenon that we know him as today, and the labels were like, who's next from his camp? And I was next, and so multiple labels wanted to sign me. Finally after playing the same demo for them, you know, for the last couple of years. Uh, Kanye's success made everything that we had made before sound a lot better to everybody, and so I multiple offers, and I took the offer at Columbia, and I'm still at Columbias. We'll be right back with more from John Legend. We're back with more from Rick and John Legend. Let's talk about ordinary people, because it's when you think of the popular music of the day when it came out, and that's not what it sounds like. It really it really stands apart from everything else going. And I can remember kind of playing for playing it for me then, and I remember being surprised that that's what he was playing me. Yeah, yeah, And that has an interesting story as well. I was managed by David Sonenberg and David managed and Seth Friedman, and they managed The Black Eyed Peas and so very early into me signing with them, Um, they loved the stuff I had done with Kanye, but they were like, do you want to work with our guy? Will I am. He's really talented too, He's a great musician, and I feel like you guys wire vibe well together. And we wrote a couple of songs that ended up on my album. One of them was she Don't Have to Know. That was the first song we ever wrote together. Then I wrote some hooks and other things for the Black Eyed Peas and then he loved writing with me and was like, um, can you come and do another session writing hooks for us? And he played a beat that was loosely based on on that la la la la la la la la la la la la la from my Sharia Moore Stevie Wonder song, just that one section of the song. He made a beat that was kind of based on that, and um, Um, I started singing, We're just ordinary people to this beat, and it was meant to be a black Eyed Peas hook that they would rap, you know, on the verses. But the more I thought about the song, I was like, you know what, well, I feel like this song isn't a Black Eyed Piece song. It's a John Legend song. And I basically took it back, took back the chorus and started writing a song, you know, a full song for me to sing around that chorus. And that's the story of ordinary people. So I told Will that, you know, if you let me take the chorus back, I'll let you produce the final product. And eventually we all came to the understanding that the demo of me just singing it with vocal and piano was better than anything we could do to it, to you know, make it sound more relevant or current or whatever, and so we just left it the way it was. It's a it's a remarkably bold choice. It was clearly the right choice, but very unusual, you know. It's so there are so many stories of the demos being better than the records, and this was one where the demo got to be the record. And it happens rarely, especially, and the reason it happens so rarely is because it rarely fits with what's going on. But yeah, when you allow something to be the thing that it is in its own greatness, as opposed to its own as opposed to how it relates to other things, it can have a life of its own, and it can have a life of its own that can transcend everything else that's going on that sounds like everything else, So it can actually exactly be a bigger deal. And I think it had the power of stopping everyone in their tracks when it came on the radio. People would tell me that they remembered the first time they heard it, and I think the fact that it sounded so different than everything else made you stop and pay attention in a way that you wouldn't have done so otherwise. Absolutely, tell me a little bit about stylistically that particular song. What would you say the inspiration was musically? Like, where was your head at for that to sound like that? Well, clearly Stevie Wonder was there, because we uh, we definitely based it off of a part of my Sharia Moore. But when you look at the top line, the vocal and the melody of the song, it's not really exactly a Stevie Wonder type melody. It was kind of based on some of my gospel influences, I think as much as anything, I don't even think of the piano as Stevie related. Yeah, but if you look at the actual progression, it's very similar to the progression on that one part of my Sharia Moore La La La La La la. That part it's first similar to that. But um, I think I think I had some gospel influences on it and some Stevie and it just came out the way it came out. Now, if we skipped forward to All of Me, which was another song that was you and a piano, Uh, huh how did that happened? That was more like a classic. Just sitting down writing on the piano session. I was writing with Toby gad Um. He has a house and uh in the valley and uh you know, he has a lovely grand piano and he just sits there and write songs. And he's written songs with all kinds of artists. Um, some really classic songs. Um. But um, we just sat there and kept writing until we felt good about it. Um. The one thing I will say, my manager mentioned she's always a woman the Billy Joels song um to me and was like you should write a song like that for Chrissy and um, she had said that to me probably within the week of me doing that session, and uh, we had tried a few ideas when we were writing Toby and I and I thought back to my manager saying that, and UH decided let's try to do that. And for some reason, all of Me Loves all of You was the course that came to mind. And and then it just it happened. And most of my writing sessions don't take long. They're usually just a few hours, maybe three hours, four hours, including you know, recording a demo of it. Um, So it doesn't usually take me the long to get somewhere with the song. And I try to be prolific as far as just creating more and more and and uh. And you know, of course you'll discard more things than you actually use. But I feel like if I go to the well as many times as possible, then I'll come up with something great more often. And so that's what I do great in in that three or four hours. How much of the song I know you end up with the demo? Do you have all the words? Um? I usually have ninety percent of what the final product is going to be. That's amazing. Part it is because I like to write with co writers, and so I think when you write with someone else, between the two or three of you, you'll you'll get like pretty much everything you need for the lyric, and it comes to me. It comes to me pretty quickly, and especially when I'm working with someone else, because those fresh ideas and fresh lens on who I am and what they expect from me. I think it's cool to have different perspectives in the room, and I think it helps us write pretty quickly, Beautiful. There's also a there's a certain benefit to taking advantage of the moment when the song first arrives. Yeah, it's like an energy that's very hard to recreate. Absolutely, And I'll occasionally go back and say, ah, this lyric isn't as effective as I would like it to be. Let me change it to something else. And I'll occasionally do that, But almost all of my songs are pretty close to being finished as compositions in the first session, Beautiful. Have you ever considered doing the whole album of just you and a piano. Yes, I've done a live album like that. This was way back we called it Live at the ten Angel. Uh, no live a the Knitting Factory. Sorry, Uh, we did one live at the ten Angel too, but that was acoustic guitar and but I did live with the Knitting Factory. Was just me on the piano the whole time. This is right before Get Lifted us. I think, oh three, Get Lifted came out No. Four, but I haven't done one since. Um, but I would definitely consider doing that. It feels like we like hearing you that way. Yeah, absolutely cool. But can you think of any difficulties that you've had to overcome to get to where you are now? Oh? I feel like there's always difficulties. I mean, I mean you start with just trying to be seen and heard and make the right connections with the right people that will help you amplify your voice to the rest of the world. So part of that is just, you know, in the traditional music business, it was trying to get a record deal, which isn't is more optional now than it used to be. Um, But back in oh four, O two oh three, it felt very mandatory. UM. And so you know, part of what the difficulties were with just being taken seriously and and and having your value seen by gatekeepers that um, that decide who gets heard by the masses. But even now, you're still every time you put a new song out, every time you put an album out, there are still gatekeepers or streaming services, radio programmers, the fans themselves. Um, everybody's still evaluating you. What have you done for me lately? One song at a time or one album at a time. And just because you've been successful before, it doesn't mean they're going to embrace whatever you do next. And so I feel like it's always going to be difficult and and and in some ways you could argue that it gets harder once you hit a certain age in this business, uh that values youth and newness. Um, you know if the same if if an artist fifteen years younger than me put out the same music, would it be accepted more because they're fresh and new? I don't know. But all I can do is make music that I'm excited about that I hope I can get other folks excited about. Absolutely. So we talked about, um, the church informing your music. Would you say that the church informed you in other ways beyond music? You know? I think, um, my parents took their faith very seriously and they they weren't hypocritical, you know, because I there's a common train of kind of holier than now fundamentalist Christians who are not only you know, devout in the sense if they go to church a lot, but they used it almost as a weapon to judge other people and to condemn other people. But I always got the sense of my parents weren't like that, they weren't hypocritical about it, and they actually took Christianity to heart in the sense of they wanted to be good people. They wanted to help their neighbors, they wanted to help the poor, they wanted to just live kind of have a healthy moral life where they did things that would hold up in their conscience and uh and and things that they could be proud of, and tried to set a good example for us. And so I think they even though I'm not religious now and and don't attend church or any religious services, I do feel like the lessons that they try to impart on us about character and what it means to be a good human being that for them were informed by their faith. But you know, they could be informed by all kinds of things, but for them, it was informed by their faith, and I think those messages did stick with me, and I think they've helped me think about how I'm supposed to move in the world. It's helped me think about what character means, what it means to be a good human being. Beautiful. It sounds like you're It sounds like you're lucky in that regard. Yeah, and and and and. Like I said, I don't believe that church or you know, or mosque or synagogue is the only way that you can learn these things or think about these things. But when there is a group of people that have committed themselves to trying to be good human beings and they talk about what that means and hold each other accountable, I think it is a healthy thing if it doesn't go too far. How would you say your relationship to music has changed since the early days of going to church to now? Oh, that's a good question. Music still gives me so much joy. I love writing music. I don't feel like I've gotten jaded in this business. I love writing music. I love the feeling when it comes together. Sometimes it doesn't come together all the way in the songwriting session, but when the production, the arrangement comes together, the you know, the right groove, the right guitar part, the right string arrangement, when the record really comes together and you just feel like you want to be immersed in it. It's so joyful, it's so exciting, it's so moving for me. And then when I hear other artists do that in a way that moves me, it just renews my faith in music, and my faith in music just keeps being renewed, and it's a really I feel so fortunate to have this be the thing that I do most of my life. It's pretty amazing. Let Me come back, John shares with us the song he's currently obsessed with. We're back with John Legend beautiful. Do you remember the last thing that really moved you musically? Oh, let's think. Well, there's a song called Outcome Too by James Blake. I play that song a lot for some reason. Something about that song. I one of my influences that I didn't talk about was nat King Cole, and I like kind of that kind of classic kind of gersh any Uh Cole Porter, those kinds of song songwriters from back in the day. And I loved Naking Cole's voice. And I was talking to James about that um with outcome too was it reminded me of some of those old songs and something about the way he sings it, the production, everything about it. I just want to hear it over and over again. I'm gonna play it right now. I really want to hear Yeah let's see I'll Come Too by James Blake. Yeah, beautiful. It's so such a well written song. I love how the melody swoops like oh god, yo wait that's right, and the strings, and I love how romantic it is and unronic it is. It's just like, you know, it's like it's about diving in, you know, and uh, it really does remind me of one of those old like nineteen twenties kind of almost like an old show too. Yeah, exactly, And it's so lovely, really beautiful. Yeah, thank you for sharing that all rat Man, Well, thank you for doing this. Thank you. And I have lots of new music that's coming soon, so hopefully everybody will check all that out when it comes. But I've been in the studio a lot the last eighteen months whenever I've had the free time, and we've made some things. I'm really excited for people to hear. Big thanks to John Legend for taking the time out to video conference with us. His new song Actions is out now, with a full album to come later this year. You can stream some of our favorite John Legend songs at broken record podcast dot com. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell me LaBelle Leah Rose, Matt Leboza, and Martin Gonzalez for Pushkin Industries. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.