Years before the awards, while he was still collecting small payments like the $500 check from Columbia Records for work on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, John Legend was always Mr. Even-Keeled. Last week, ahead of a solo concert in Clearwater, the man born John Stephens told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that he’s just naturally that way.
“What I tell people is I don’t have some secret to attaining this level of calm. It’s my natural disposition,” Legend, 47, said, adding that the things that upset him the most are injustices.
“I know that sounds like a political answer, but it’s the truth. As I’m watching the news, as I’m seeing contempt for human life and disregard for human life in some of our leadership—that’s the kind of stuff that makes me really angry,” he said. “And I think it motivates me to do what I can to try to make things better and be active politically, because it truly angers me when I see injustice and disregard for human life.”
Legend doesn’t get too deep into that during “An Evening of Songs & Stories,” a show he’s reviving after spending last year celebrating the 20th anniversary of the triple-Grammy winning album Get Lifted. Instead, the two-and-a-half-hour concert, which visited Tampa Bay in 2023 and 2024, finds the EGOT philanthropist and activist spending about 45 minutes between songs talking and really pulling the curtains back on the ups and difficult downs that shaped his life and viewpoint. Complete with personal photos and revealing disclosures, the show is a rare look into the psyche and heart, really, of a man known for making being a Legend look easy.
Legend, 13-time Grammy winner, caught back up with CL last week to talk a little about the gig, and dive into other topics like suffering, songwriting, and why he’s not giving his daughter a smartphone until she turns 16 (sorry, Luna!).
John Legend
Time Wed., March 18, 8 p.m.
Location Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen Booth Rd., Clearwater
I’m gonna try to get you in and out of here in 15 minutes. I know you got a lot going on. How’s it going today?
It’s going great. Just a normal day in L.A. I took the kids to school in the morning, worked out and now I’m talking about these shows coming up—looking forward to it.
I want to do a quick checkup on the shows. I haven’t seen this show since ’24. What I thought I observed, and tell me this is kind of similar to what folks who maybe will be seeing you for the first time will experience: You talk for about 45 minutes. It’s a two-and-a-half hour show, lots of pictures. There was a great medley with songs that you’ve been on, including some gospel standards that you love, a wardrobe change… Does that sound about right? I don’t want to give too much away.
It’ll be similar to what you’ve seen before when I’ve done the solo shows. Most of last year we were touring with the full band doing the Get Lifted 20th anniversary tour, but we came back to the show because we love doing it, and I personally love doing it, and my audience really enjoyed connecting with me on a deeper level, I think. I share a lot of vulnerable moments about my growing up and some of the struggles we had in my family. I talk about the stories behind some of these songs, and like you said, I talk about some of the records I was a part of early in my career before people knew who I was, so it’s a really fun night for me. I found that my fans are really enjoying it, because they love getting that deeper connection with artists.
And I’m wondering, are you going to talk at all about the work that you’re doing with Pharrell and what you kind of have coming up? I mean, it’s kind of cool, you won the EGOT already. So it’s like you just got it out of the way; you can just keep creating art and keep moving forward.
I think winning the EGOT certainly makes awards matter even less than they did before. And even before, I think I really was focused on the art, and really focused on making the best art I could possibly make, and making sure that it was something I was proud of and something I was excited to share with my audience, and I definitely am excited for people to hear what we do next.
I don’t know how comfortable I am asking you, but I’m just going to ask you because I’m so interested in how you write songs. I know you love songwriting, the craft, the fact that you show up in the morning and then you do work and there’s something there that wasn’t there before. You’ve talked extensively about it. I’ve watched you bang around chords and stuff in that Splice video, but I’m wondering if this is something you would do for me, and you could tell me, ‘no.’ I’m wondering if you would tell me the name of your most recent voice note and song idea. Maybe play a part of it, and maybe talk to me about what you’re hearing in the note there as you revisit a moment where maybe you woke up in the middle of the night and put a note down. Are you willing to do that?
I put in the voice note this morning. I don’t want to play it for you yet, because it’s for a special project that we haven’t announced yet, but it’s for Broadway. I sang it into my phone this morning, actually, when I was working out. I’d gotten some pages from our book writer yesterday with dialog ideas and a pitch for a song at a certain moment. And so my job after that is to go and write it, write the song. An idea came to me this morning when I was in the gym and I sang it into my phone, which is what I tend to do, writing an idea.
I think we’re on an embargo about this news, but by the time we pub, the world will know about your work on “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” Is that what you’re working on?
You’re good for that, and we’re producers of that, so I’m not responsible for any of the songwriting for that. Obviously that’s Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of his classic shows, and it’s reinterpreted through the ballroom scene in New York. It’s a really fun, exciting and imaginative send up of the original. So we’re excited for people to see it, and we’re excited to be producers on it,
Forgive me, I’m gonna jump around a little bit. The last time I talked to you, we were talking about a Christmas album, and I think Luna was still at the age where she was maybe gonna realize what Christmas was. And I’ve been listening to your kids album with Sufjan Stevens, and I think about him a lot. His music helped me through a lot of grief—Carrie & Lowell especially. I think about him, especially as he works through GBS. My brother and I—he used to work for the Jesuits—and we talk a lot about suffering in the world. And I know you have this song “Show Me,”it’s kind of this question, asking what you’re going to do about the world. And I don’t know how comfortable I feel asking this question, but when I think about Sufjan, I think about him being in that chair, and I think about suffering, but outside of how you react to suffering, how do you process the suffering in the world? And how do you explain suffering to your kids?
You know it’s difficult to explain suffering to your kids, but what I try to do is help them understand: one that they’re fortunate to be in the position that they’re in, but that other people aren’t so fortunate. And we try to expose them to the work that Chrissy and I do when it comes to helping other people and include them in that as much as possible. We know we can’t solve everything, and fix everyone’s pain, and alleviate everyone’s suffering, but we try to do what we have the power to do, which is use our platform and our resources to help as many people as we can. So we try to demonstrate to our kids how important that is to us, and hope that they learn by example that that’s something that they should do in their lives, too.
And I know, I think you mentioned, you know, sometimes therapy in your relationship, you have to work at trying not to be a fixer, maybe in the context of Chrissy and when she’s venting to you.
Oh man, you’re pulling good notes.
I mean, I love talking to you, You’re so, I don’t mean “polished” in, like, a bad way, but you’re always on, right? You always know what to say. And, I mean, God, you’re the kid who, at 15, wrote an incredible essay for a McDonald’s contest. I guess what I’m trying to say is I was thinking about something that you did in Florida. You raised a shit ton—excuse my French there—of money for the state when Amendment 4 was on the ballot in 2018. That’s the movement to restore voting rights for felons who did their time.
Your’re someone who shows up, right? You were at one of the first court hearings for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. I’ve seen you speak to the Black, Brown and College Bound summits. Here you visited the prisons too. How much are you still visiting prisons with free America? I know you have a lot of different initiatives out there.
Yeah, we still do. And one of the things that we’ve done lately is really trying to highlight the problem of death in jail in prison. We’ve been working with a no more more jail death initiative in Louisiana. We just amplified the message of “The Alabama Solution,” which focuses on their issue with the harm and death caused to some of the folks who are incarcerated In Alabama. That film is nominated for an Academy Award, and we’re doing what we can to get the message out about that as well. I had nothing to do with producing it, we just think it’s an important message because I visited so many prisons and jails and talked to families, folks who lost some of their loved ones who were incarcerated at the time.
The issues are really important to me, because I get to see the human beings who are affected by it. And it’s not just intellectual, it’s not just reading about it. It’s really being proximate to the issues and to the human beings who are affected by these issues. And once you do that, you build this emotional pool toward doing something. You know you can’t just sit back and watch it happen. You want to do something to help. So we’re doing what we can to help, in regards to preventing deaths that are really preventable in our jails and prisons, and really recognizing the humanity of people, even when they’ve made a mistake that landed them in prison or jail.
Again, I’m going to bounce around so I’m sorry, because I only have 15 minutes. You mentioned being on the road to celebrate Get Lifted. I love your story about that $500 check from Columbia after you contributed to the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and you’ve talked about being grounded because you have all these friends from your Ivy League life, and they work in finance, and they work in academics. They have bylines in the New York Times, you know. And your group chats are so robust, and you can talk about things that are so outside of music and just so outside of small things. I’m wondering, is Dr. Deborah Kenny one of those friends?
She’s definitely one of my friends. I didn’t meet her in college or in my younger years, but I was able to meet her as I was having more conversations around improving our schools, improving public education. And now I’m on the board of the school group that she founded, Harlem Village Academy—and they do just remarkable, remarkable work. We are publishing her book, which kind of explains her approach to education. And what I love about it is she’s working in urban schools, and a lot of times, most of her students are Black and brown, and a lot of times you find that there’s kind of an implicit lowering of expectations for kids who come from that kind of background. And what I love about her approach is that she doesn’t lower her expectations for them. She has really high expectations, and she also has high expectations for herself as an educator and the educators she works with to give them a truly high quality education that encourages them to be great critical thinkers, great writers, great lovers of reading and learning. I just love her philosophy. Not only is it great for running schools, but I think it’s a great book for parents who are trying to prepare their kids for life, and so we’re really excited that we’re publishing that. The book is called “The Well Educated Child,” and it’s coming soon.
Do you think it’s too lofty of a goal for yourself to stick to that pact you have with your other parents to not give your kids a smartphone until they’re like 16? I heard Luna trying to get you to compromise.
Ha! You have to stick together as parents. You know Jonathan Haidt, has been going around talking about his book, “The Anxious Generation,” and what I love about his whole I press campaign is that he’s been really practical to parents about how they can work on this together in kind of alliance with each other. One of the main things is the idea of collective action, because if one or two parents kind of break the pact and let their kids use the phone before everyone else does, it starts that domino effect of everybody else saying, ‘Well, she gets to do it, he gets to do it.’ And so we’re trying to be really thoughtful with our fellow parents at our kids’ school, to stick together and really abide by the commitments we’ve made to each other.
Because we’ve seen the research and seen the negative effects that social media and smartphones have had on our young people, and we’ve seen enough—we know enough, with the data, and we know that we need to protect them and their brains while they’re still early in development. And I think they’ll thank us for it later. They won’t thank us for it now.
Luna was pretty convincing. I’m gonna try to squeeze in two or three questions, maybe one that will just ruin my chance to interview again. You’re Mr. Even Keel. Everything looks easy with you. I know that’s not the truth, and you’re pretty open about that. But what are some things that you, John Legend, John Stephens, struggles with still today?
You’re right, I’m pretty even-keeled, all the time. There’s not really much time when I’m not. I’m just naturally that way. What I tell people is I don’t have some secret to attaining this level of calm. It’s my natural disposition. The things that upset me the most are injustice, honestly. And I know that sounds like a political answer, but it’s the truth. As I’m watching the news, as I’m seeing contempt for human life and disregard for human life in some of our leadership—that’s the kind of stuff that makes me really angry, and I think it motivates me to do what I can to try to make things better and be active politically, because it truly angers me when I see injustice and disregard for human life.
You toured with Sade. Can you just tell me if she’s going to do it again soon? I know you didn’t know about Beyonce at the DNC, but what do you know about Sade man?
I hate to break it to you, but I don’t know. I am very much hopeful that that happens again, that we get another album again. You know, because she takes her time, but when she does come out she makes it worth it. And I was so honored to be on that tour, and I would do it again, if she wanted to do it again.,
I would love to see that. Thanks for your time. Always good to talk to you, and congratulations on just everything. It’s cool to see you do it.
Thank you. I appreciate your level of research and engagement. So thank you.
Of course, man, it’s my pleasure. Talk to you soon. Thank you.
Alright. Bye, thanks.
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This article appears in Mar. 12 – 18, 2026.