Alright ladies and gentlemen for those of you listening to the midday show I am DJ
Joey and as you may have heard John Legend is coming to Taiwan very soon March 19th at
Nangang c3 Plaza and
for those of you like me who's been a fan of his since he debuted in 04 I hope you got tickets to the show
Now John stormed out of the gate running he debuted with get lifted won the 06 Grammy Awards for Best R&B album
among a couple of others including Best, New Artist and Best Male R&B vocal performance for ordinary people
He delivered platinum albums one after another his music is so full its graceful his character
I would say he's well-mannered and always composed but today we get a chance to find out what the legend is
Like in living color says we welcome, John Legend to the midday show John. It's so good to have you here
Oh, thanks for having me
I'm excited to talk to you guys and really excited to come to play in Taipei for the very first time now
This is not your first time in Asia. What do you always look forward to when you visit this part of the world?
Yeah, we've been to lots of places in Asia, but uh yeah, we're looking forward to the entire trip. We'll be in Japan
We'll be in South Korea the Philippines
and Malaysia
Thailand and China as well, you know my favorite part of any trip is the food and especially in Asia
I'm going to enjoy eating. Oh yeah for sure and of course playing for our fans
Yeah, in Asia we I mean we pride ourselves on the food here. Have you developed a palate for the Asian food?
Definitely as you know my wife is half Thai and so
There's a lot of Asian food that is eaten in our home, and I'm a big fan
so I liked it before but now I love it whether it's Thai food or
Hotpot or you know Pho
Sushi
We're just eating all kinds of Asian food all the time in our house
Oh good, because Taiwan is essentially a central hub a collective of all those kind of things you just mentioned so you're gonna
Have fun here, but speaking about your family. Are you going to be bringing any of your family alone for the ride? Yeah?
They'll be along for some of it, I think they have to go home right before we go to Taipei
But they're gonna be with me the first half of the trip
And then Chrissy she has to go back home to get back to work
So she's coming to as much as she can recently on Ellen's show Chrissy told us that you guys will be expecting in June, so
Congratulations. Thank you. How has parenthood influenced your professional career? Well, I think it influences everything
We really love having
Luna in our lives she's such a light and such an exciting part of our lives
And I think it makes you to think about everything you do when it comes to work
Making sure your priorities are right and and making sure your scheduling is right and
Also, I think it just gives me more inspiration for what I write and what I think about Luna speaking of heard she's about to
celebrate her second birthday in mid April
But ahead of that you yourself are going to be doing something pretty impressive in early April on Easter Sunday
You're going to be playing the lead role of Jesus Christ Superstar live on NBC is that right yeah? I'm so excited
We're in the middle of rehearsals right now. I've been steeped in it every day
focusing on
Getting ready to play that role
and then we're gonna take a break and come to Asia for a few weeks and
Come back to New York and rehearse for another week and
And then it'll be Easter Sunday, and we'll be live in front of the world
Jesus Christ yeah, man
This is gonna be interesting a lot of our listeners might be too young to know about this show
This is an Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical production has won the hearts of billions since the 70s
Have you grown up with the show and how did this collaboration come about?
Well, I've known about the show for a long time
I thank some of the songs when I was in show choir in high school, so I've been very familiar with
That musical, but also a lot of Angela Weber stuff over the years, and so it's really cool to actually work with them
I got to spend time with Andrew already and
I'm really excited to play this character. All right. Well. We can't wait. I certainly can't wait
Don't forget everybody else Easter Sunday on NBC John Legend, alongside, Sara Bareilles and Alice Cooper
It's gonna be a great show Jesus Christ Superstar live, but let's now talk about the album darkness and light released late 2016
Would you say John is this a conceptual album, and if so what's the overarching theme of course?
There's love and family, but what else is also on this album. Well I think
the title I usually
Some artists like to start with a title and a concept and then write a bunch of songs for it
I usually do it the other way around I start with
Songs and see where my mind is as I'm writing new songs
And then I see what themes emerge from the songs and then titled album
and so that's what I did with this album as well and
That theme of darkness and light kept kind of emerging in the lyrics of the songs that I was writing
And I think the idea behind darkness and light is that there is darkness in the world there's fear. There's uncertainty there's conflict
but
we're looking for that light and our family and music and love and
This album is about that search for light in the darkness okay when I first saw the name of the album
I thought okay first you have darkness, and then you have light
I thought you were going to come to an epiphany, and we're going to end up on a high note
On the light to note I would say but the last track of the album is called marching into the dark
Can you tell us about the planning of that song being the last track well?
I never wanted to be like
one half of them is dark and when I found it like I wanted to be kind of a push and pull where
It you're kind of
Struggling between darkness and light the whole time that
Lasts so I'm working into the dark really was about uncertainty and not knowing what the future brings and also
particularly in that song we were thinking about
People who have given their lives for struggles for like freedom and for
justice for other people
wondering you know will they ever
Understand what they've been able to give to us would they ever know you know the results of their labour
Will we ever get to the place where?
You know we'll reach the promised land that those people wanted us to get to and
So the idea that you're marching into the dark saying you're moving forward
You're trying to make progress, but you don't know if you're ever going to get there
But you got to keep your head up right, but you got to keep marching
That's that's the idea behind it all right. There is a lot of great tracks on the album
I particularly like a lot of the collaborations when Chance the rapper Britney how her from Alabama Shakes
And you got R&B extraordinary Miguel also on the track for you
What's one of your favorite tracks and can you tell us a story so I can play it for our listeners?
Oh, I love Overload the track I did with Miguel
It was the last song we wrote for the album and
we had been trying to get a session with Miguel for a while both of our schedules did line up for a while and
It finally just as we were about to finish the album
We hung out for a few hours
In the middle week in Los Angeles, and we came up with something in a few hours
That was really cool and ended up being one of my favorite songs in the album, here it is
It is all right Miguel and John Legend on overload right here on ICRT
Okay, John this next question is for myself. I love all of your albums, but I especially adore the collabo you did in
2010 with the roots for those of you who haven't heard this one this won the Grammy Award Best R&B album
And I think this was an album that was inspired when you were campaigning for Obama
Where you were kind of?
Reflecting the social ambience of that moment would you consider a collabo like this or some an album that speaks out to the social or?
Political atmosphere of where you are yeah, I think I would consider doing that again. I really love that project
I love working with the roots on it, and I'm really proud of it to do it too
I just popped it in the other day. Just just take our reminisce on that time period it was really beautiful
time I'm making music together and
It feels like you know once would have been better to come out now. Yeah, I thought so back there
Yeah, I just feel like the subject matter is so important right now, and I think people are
really aware of what's happening politically because we have such a
Disturbing person running our country right now. Yeah, you and Chrissy have both been very outspoken
And so when it comes to the persons that you are and of course we love to hear more musically
It's for you to speak out of course
You've worked on collabo albums like we were just mentioning wake up, but there's also you've appeared in so many movies
You know you contributed to the soundtrack or you actually appeared in the movies Beauty and the Beast, Selma,
Django Unchained and
La-la-land, so what's next for John Legend. What else do you want to do well?
After we get done with Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm gonna go back and start writing or new material
And recording the next album my production company's always moving ahead with a new project as well
so they'll probably be some more film and music collaborations of my future and
Fatherhood is next to fatherhood as times do
With the new baby coming and uh, I'm excited about that too
Yeah, and good luck juggling two babies in a career at the same time. It's uh. It's not going to be easy
Yeah I can imagine
All right lastly. What's your show John gonna be like here in Asia?
And maybe a shout out to our listeners and your fans here in Asia. Yeah, I think people are gonna love the show
It's the show is all about the music. I thought about love
It's all about connecting to each other and feeling that love among each other
and we do songs from all of the albums from get lifted through darkness and light including wake up and
Yeah, I hopefully will play all your favorites, and we'll have a really fun
energetic
Loving night
All right. This is John Legend. Don't forget. He's gonna be in Taipei March 19th
Nangang C3 Plaza, tickets are nearly sold out you might be lucky enough to grab a couple of them still and John
Thank you so much for taking the time to take this interview
Thank you, my pleasure can't wait to see you, and you have a good day. All right
See you soon
Hello handsome and gorgeous thank you for watching our video
If you like more general shenanigans
or artists interviews, please make sure you click to the next video
But also make sure you subscribe to us by pressing the bell button down here because we'd like to tell you more about fun stuff
coming up