Posted on 01/23/2009
My friends and I have never called John Legend by his name. Seriously. When Kanye West’s College Dropout came out and the four of us were huddled by the university’s sound stage with our teddy bear t-shirts, he was just the “piano guy,” talented as golden ducats but still nameless. Though we didn’t know his name, we acknowledged his comet-like stage presence; he was like a Motown deus ex machina armed with keyboard and delicious vocals. Ten minutes before Kanye comes on, he asks, “Can I play you just one song?” Three of his opening-act colleagues had asked the same question to sucked teeth and groans, but we, the audience, were refreshed that John Legend’s rhetorical question did not bind us to a rhetorical answer, that we could say yes and mean it.

It’s five years later. John Legend’s third album Evolver has met the retailers. The project does not showcase the same chocolaty John Legend that his first two projects did, and for that, some fans have abandoned the parade. He was not the only one to change. Since that spring concert, my teddy bear shirt has made its way to a non-descript storage bin while I graduated and became a music writer. And now, instead of watching him in concert, I’m interviewing him.

“Some people are concerned that this album isn’t as soulful as the last album,” John Legend confesses to me. “But I understand when I make decisions to go in a different direction that some people aren’t gonna love it.” He has just finished a rehearsal for Dancing with the Stars, on which he will be performing “Green Light,” Evolver’s first single. He’s being very diplomatic, saying the things that humble superstars should say in an interview. Yet, somehow I can sense that we’re both really thinking the same thought: Evolver is John Legend’s strongest release. With its futuristic accompaniment and cutting edge songwriting, the album redefines him. For those who aren’t savvy enough to pick up on the mission, fuck ‘em.

Back to my friends. A few months after the Ye concert, we’re flipping through cable channels in our tiny ass dormitory lounge when we see a video with that same guy from the concert. He’s playing the piano, this time in a church, singing a secular “baby, baby, baby” song. By now, the pop world has become well acquainted with John Legend and even R&B dilettantes know his name. Except us. Despite the buzzing testaments to Legend’s refreshing sound, there is something too familiar about it to us. It has a soulful melody with a gospel texture, kinda like Marvin Gaye at Sunday Service. Thus, it is settled. We refuse to call John Legend by his name. Instead, we start calling him “Pastor Marvin.”

It turns out that song we heard was “Used to Love U,” the first song off Legend’s debut album Get Lifted. We also find out more scintillating tidbits like his real name is John Stevens and he graduated from an Ivy League university (Penn), where he performed at several open-mics and recitals during his undergraduate years. The first few years after graduation, he worked as a consultant while moonlighting as a recording artist under Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label.

As much as Pastor Marvin sounded like someone we’ve heard before, he reminded my buddies and me of everything beautiful about being black. The pride. The rhythm. Legend would go on to sing the smashing hits “Number One” and “Ordinary People,” and like that the nickname “Pastor Marvin” transformed from merely an observation to a full coronation.

“I want to be known for music that moved people, inspired them, and challenged them,” says the 30 year old singer. “I want them to have that nostalgia about music that I have now. That music which is gonna mean something to them in 20 years.” Yet, his mind is elsewhere. Maybe he’s thinking about the grueling rehearsal for Dancing With the Stars. Maybe it’s my dumb ass question asking him how he wants to be remembered in history. Either way, he’s trying to do his best with my banal inquisition while I’m butting my head for asking him questions that we both know the answer to.

In a conversation about pre-eminent soul singers, John Legend’s name doesn’t just pop up, it’s the point of the discussion. Besides, Anthony Hamilton, Raphael Saadiq, and maybe Raheem Devaughn, John Legend knows no peers. As the most recent Grammy winner of the three, he is the vanguard of Nu Soul genre. He has been involved in high profile collaborations both as a piano player (Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything”) and a vocalist (Alicia Keys’ “You Don’t Know My Name, Slum Village’s “Selfish,” T.I.’s “Slide Show,” among others). Recently, he has stretched his work to the political realm where he has used his influence promote Barack Obama’s campaign. He sang in the Will.I.Am produced “Yes We Can” and threw a free benefit concert at both his alma mater and his hometown Springfield, Ohio.

But you know most of this already. So maybe you ought to know my friends and I still managed not to call John Legend by his name even after his breakthrough debut. The short answer involves the radio station 98.7 Kiss FM and a road trip to North Carolina.

It had been four years since John Legend was just a keyboard and a voice at Kanye West’s College Dropout Tour. The four of us graduated and rented a four-bedroom apartment in Harlem. Then, one of my friends decided to go to graduate school at the University of North Carolina and, as rite of passage or an excuse to travel, we decided to drive him to his new school and move him in.

We were riding in his beat up Cutlass Supreme on seats littered with fast food remainders and crinkled print outs of Google maps, telling dirty jokes, when this song comes on the radio. It doesn’t sound like the type of hit Kiss FM would play. There’s very little that’s contemporary or urban about it. In fact, with the exception of his husky vocals, the singer sounds white. If we were trapped in 1943, I would have easily identified the voice as Frank Sinatra. He’s singing, “Save room for my love/ Save room for a moment to be with me,” in that ballad-y crooning way, an enamoring throwback to the Swing era.

We had no idea who the singer was and KISS FM kept teasing us with the mystery piece every twelfth song or so. We were literally on an eight-hour road trip on a random highway in New Jersey, without the help of metropolis buzz to pinpoint this new single. It was not until we get back to New York City four days later that we found out that the song was “Save Room,” John Legend’s newest single from his sophomore album Once Again.

But deep down we knew all along. I realized real soon that we were not having problems identifying the singer. Instead, we were really having problems admitting that an artist could really change that drastically from one album to the next.

“I listen to Jeff Buckley. Something about his voice and the way he expresses himself is very soulful, very spiritual. I also listen to The Beatles quite a lot as well. Abbey Road, The White Album, got quite a few of their albums,” John Legend says to me as our conversation winds down. I’m happy because I finally asked him a worthwhile question about his non-Black musical influences and we’re starting to get at how he channels his inner chameleon with each album.

First time I heard “Green Light,” my reaction was tepid. Actually, it was specifically less than tepid. The first image that came to my mind when I heard the cosmic sounding lead single, was a scene from the movie The Five Heartbeats. It’s the part when the fictional soul group, whose popularity is declining along with the Soul era, hires the Michael “Flash” Turner as their lead singer only to watch him declare that he is going solo months later. The rest of the Heartbeats get their rude awakening when they see Flash on TV with futuristic garb, performing a Disco song. Flash’s outlandish look and direction are meant to be over the top. Viewers are supposed to see him as a sellout.

But is he really? John Legend is very similar to “Flash.” Evolver is full of synths and technological sounds. Yet in it, Legend does what artists should do: change. He even hints at this evolution in the video “Green Light,” as he starts off playing “Ordinary People” to a room full of people who only treat the song as background music. After he breaks out into the reviving “Green Light” and a cocktail gathering turns to an all out dance party, Andre 3000 poignantly adlibs, “Sometimes you gotta step from behind that piano…let them know what’s going on!”

It took three albums for my friends and I to acknowledge that it does take a legend to shape shift so significantly from album to album. Whether it’s the electronic “Satisfaction” or the lime of reggae in “No Other Love” featuring Estelle, Evolver does what other albums only do in their promo kit and that is reinvent an artist. “Everything I do is gonna have a little bit of Soul to it, but musically I didn’t wanna keep doing the same arrangements,” John Legend says to wrap-up our talk. Point taken.

Now, not only do I salute him by his first name, I consider Evolver, his third album, self-titled.

- Sidik Fofana



Watch John Legends newest video for “Everybody Knows” off Evolver below: