Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Singer-songwriter and campaigner; one of 16 living EGOT winners with 12 Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, and two Emmys.
On the island
Eight records
Here Comes the SunFavourite
I've chosen Here Comes a Sun, the Nina Simone version. Of course, it's a great Beatles song, and it's been covered by many, including myself. But Nina Simone's version is very special to me. I named my daughter Luna Simone after her. And I feel like if I'm on a deserted island and I wake up every morning to this song, every day is going to start beautifully.
I have a special place in my heart for early 90s hip-hop. This song, They Reminisce Over You. It's a perfect song, I think, if you're on a desert island because you're probably missing a lot of people. The song craft is just beautiful, and this song never gets old to me. I could listen to it all the time.
Aretha Franklin is one of the greatest artists of all time, one of the greatest vocalists of all time, and someone I've had a chance to be around and work with. And this is one of my favorite songs of hers. It's called Daydreaming. It just takes you to a magical place. It's ethereal, gorgeous. Her voice just floats on the track. It's truly one of my favorite listens in the world.
This song is by Jay-Z. It's part of the American Gangster album, which is one of my favorite albums and one of Jay-Z's best albums, though I think it's underrated and undercovered. And I just feel like he was in his bag in this album. He was just fully at his best telling the stories of him as a drug dealer growing up in Brooklyn. And this particular song, Rock Boys, and the winner is... I love the horn section on this song. It just rouses you and gets you ready for whatever you're about to do. And so I use it a lot of times as my get ready for my show kind of song to get me going and feeling good and like, you know, I'm ready to take on the world.
This person is basically my musical godfather and a huge influence to me, a friend, and someone who I've gotten the chance to collaborate with and spend time with. And he was even at our wedding when we got married and sang an impromptu song on the piano. It's Stevie Wonder. This is not the song he sang at our wedding, but it's one of my favorite songs, and it's a great wedding song because it's about telling someone you'll love them forever. It's called As.
This song was played at our wedding multiple times. Biz Markey was our DJ, and we just felt like this was the anthem for our wedding. It's about celebrating love and commitment to each other, and it's by one of the greatest artists on the planet, Beyoncé. And the song's called Love on Top.
Well, my dad used to play Nat King Cole around the house quite a lot and I would say Nat King Cole is one of my biggest vocal influences. And he was just such an interesting person in his life. He did so much. He hosted a television show when black men were not on television at all in America. He was just a phenomenal human being and uh My wife and I love singing this song to each other. It's called L-O-V-E.
This song was playing when my daughter was born, so our firstborn. Luna Simone, named after Nina Simone. So to bookend this playlist, this is the song that was playing when she literally came out of the womb and I was in charge of DJing the soundtrack to my wife's pushing and this was the song that happened to be playing when delivery process culminated. It was Curtis Mayfield, Superfly, and in honor of my wife and all she's gone through to give us children. And my daughter, Luna Simone. Here's Superfly by one of the greatest artists of all time.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:31Do you know in the moment when you've got lightning in a bottle, or is it hard to tell?
You don't know one because I'm excited whenever I finish a song… It felt good. I was happy with it. I thought it was a well-written song. I changed a few lines in the subsequent days… We just decided to keep it simple and strip back and it worked. When I first sang it for Chrissy… She cried, so that was a good sign. And the more I played it for people, I just was getting the sense that this one wasn't just another good song, it was special.
Presenter asks
5:33What's it like playing a show like [the Biden inauguration]? How do you prepare?
Well, it's cold, first of all, extremely cold. So it was still in the height of pandemic precautions, so there was no audience there. We're just there with the marine band and me on the piano in the freezing cold.
Presenter asks
5:56Growing up in Ohio, what are your earliest musical memories of the family?
I grew up singing and playing in church, but even before that I grew up around my mother directing the choir and my grandmother playing the organ at church and I was at choir rehearsal in the womb, I like to say. We just were raised in a house full of music. We had a piano there, drum kit there. I started taking piano lessons when I was three or four years old and started singing in the church choir when I was seven and I've always loved being in front of people singing.
The keepsakes
The book
David Graeber and David Wengrow
I decided to pick a book that I haven't finished reading yet, but I just started, and I I feel like this deserted island is going to give me time to finish it. It's a pretty thick book. It's called The Dawn of Everything, and it's by David Graeber and David Wingro. This book explores human history, and it kind of puts a new lens on human history, and says some of our assumptions about what our ancestors were like have been wrong all this time. And so I want to learn more about that. And I feel like in this time of solitude, it'd be interesting to learn more about History and and how we came to be where we are.
The luxury
I've decided I want to bring my piano. I feel like it's a quite a m uh a large, extravagant luxury item, but I mean, for obvious reasons it could be quite useful.
Presenter asks
11:00You were home schooled until you were eleven. Why did your parents decide to educate you that way?
They were very religious and they wanted religious education for us and one that was kind of sheltered from the secular world. And for a time, they sent us to a private Christian school that was based at a local church, but it got a little too pricey for them to afford. And so they decided rather than send us to public school, they would just bring us home and teach us from the curriculum of the Christian school. But my mom would teach us herself. And she was a stay-at-home mother and quite a good teacher, even though she didn't have any formal training as a teacher. In some ways, it was a pretty conservative curriculum. It taught creationism. And so I think I've got the least amount of good teaching in science. And I had to make up for that later in life on my own, going to the library and independent study. But yeah, it kind of had a conservative bent to it.
Presenter asks
17:24How did you fit in with everybody else at college, being two years younger and from a different place?
I didn't fit in. It took a while because I came from a small Midwestern town, which was rare. Most of the kids were either from big cities or from suburbs of big cities. And then I was materially less wealthy than most of my classmates, growing up in a working-class family with a factory worker as a dad. And then I was 16. It's a big difference… the first time I ever got on a plane was at age 16 to visit Penn's campus. So I get there, and it's a culture shock for me. But I think music was always my way of connecting with people because I knew I could sing, and I knew I could play. And if I just was able to show people what I could do there, it kind of broke the ice for every other conversation.
Presenter asks
21:41You changed your name from John Stevens to John Legend, which is a bold move. Tell me about choosing the surname and deciding to go for it.
Well, I didn't choose the surname. It kind of chose me. But one of our friends, his name was Jay Ivey, and he's a great spoken word artist from Chicago. He started calling me the legend. My voice reminded him of those classic artists that we grew up listening to. And Kanye would often use me instead of using samples from that classic era. He would just use my voice instead. And I think Jay Ivey took that and started calling me the legend because of that. And then after a while of them playing with that nickname, they were like. Man, you you should just call yourself John Legend. But it's also, you know, quite presumptuous as well to call yourself a legend before you even have gotten a record deal. And so I decided, you know what? Who knows what's going to happen with my career, but I'm going into it with the faith in myself and the belief in myself. That is going to work out and I'm going to try to live up to this name. And so that's what I tried to do.
“You write songs and the process for me is almost always the same. You're just sitting in a room maybe with another person and maybe a couple of people in the room and you try to create something beautiful and you don't know what's going to happen with it when you create it. But sometimes you stumble on something that is life changing.”
“I didn't fit in. It took a while because I came from a small Midwestern town, which was rare. Most of the kids were either from big cities or from suburbs of big cities. And then I was materially less wealthy than most of my classmates, growing up in a working-class family with a factory worker as a dad. And then I was 16.”
“Well, I didn't choose the surname. It kind of chose me. But one of our friends, his name was Jay Ivey, and he's a great spoken word artist from Chicago. He started calling me the legend. My voice reminded him of those classic artists that we grew up listening to. And Kanye would often use me instead of using samples from that classic era. He would just use my voice instead. And I think Jay Ivey took that and started calling me the legend because of that. And then after a while of them playing with that nickname, they were like. Man, you you should just call yourself John Legend. But it's also, you know, quite presumptuous as well to call yourself a legend before you even have gotten a record deal. And so I decided, you know what? Who knows what's going to happen with my career, but I'm going into it with the faith in myself and the belief in myself. That is going to work out and I'm going to try to live up to this name. And so that's what I tried to do.”
“Well, it was difficult and I I was hesitant to share it, but I think Chrissy was really right in encouraging us to share it because I think it really was powerful for a lot of people and way more people than anybody realizes go through this. And I think they feel alone a lot of times. They told us they felt alone a lot of times. And us sharing our experience helped people feel less alone and feel like there were other people going through it and that there was a community of people going through it. And I think It was a really powerful, wise decision by Chrissy to share it because It helped a lot of people.”
“It's hard, it's hard to try to comfort anyone that's going through it because there's no real comfort and you're always going to feel that loss. It kind of spreads over time so it doesn't feel as heavy over time, but you'll never forget it.”