How John Legend and Sufjan Stevens found the 'emotional wisdom' in children's music
Two decades after the release of his debut album, John Legend was at a point where children’s music was probably inevitable.
The smooth-voiced EGOT winner had already moved beyond his trademark R&B to make a Christmas record and compose his first musical; he’d already put in several seasons as a coach on “The Voice” and taken a gig portraying the son of God in a live TV adaptation of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Also: He and his wife, the model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, have four kids under the age of 9.
“This literally started,” he says with a laugh, “with me playing one of the songs from my daughter’s Fisher-Price play mat.”
Read more: Mustard on fatherhood, his new album and the world-stopping 'Not Like Us'
If it’s easy to see how the convergence of Legend’s life and career led to the new “My Favorite Dream” — particularly given how large his family looms in Teigen’s business as a lifestyle maven with 42 million Instagram followers — few would have predicted that he’d record the LP with Sufjan Stevens, the elusive indie-folk auteur known for his delicate singing and his elaborate concept albums about U.S. states.
“That’s what everyone keeps saying,” Legend, 45, acknowledges. “But I’ve been a fan of his for 20 years.”
The result of their unlikely partnership, due Friday, is a lush yet gentle collection of songs rich with choral backing vocals and quirky chamber-orchestra textures. The songs are roughly divided into two groups: uptempo party tunes and get-ready-for-bed lullabies; in addition to Legend’s originals, the album has covers of “You Are My Sunshine” and Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”
As unexpected as it was, Legend’s recruitment of Stevens was actually the latest in a series of interesting choices by an artist who got his start in the late ’90s and early 2000s playing on records by Lauryn Hill and Kanye West and who scored his first No. 1 pop hit in 2014 with a stripped-down piano ballad, “All of Me,” at a moment when those were scarce on the charts. Since then he’s collaborated with producers Blake Mills and Raphael Saadiq on albums that brought varied framings to his polished croon.
Says Stevens: “He’s a shape-shifter. I could feel the curiosity behind what he does.”
For Legend, each new project represents “a discovery process,” he says, seated on a sofa at a West Hollywood home he and Teigen use as a creative headquarters. Upstairs is Legend’s recording studio; downstairs, an expansive kitchen where his wife develops recipes. Standing right inside the front door is one of those arcade games where you use a motorized claw to try to grab a plush toy.
“It’s not always clear what the outcome is gonna be,” Legend adds of his approach. “I just want to feel pushed in different ways.”
“My Favorite Dream” grew out of a video Teigen shared online in which Legend sings “Maybe” — a cheerful Fisher-Price ditty about a purple monkey in a bubblegum tree — for his 1-year-old, Esti.
“People were like, ‘John, why don’t you do more of these?’” he recalls. “And I was like, 'Yeah, why don’t I?'” Legend says he thinks of himself as a songwriter “at least as much” as he thinks of himself as a performer, so he started writing tunes of his own based on “all the things we’re always talking about with the kids”: love, family, animals, nature. (The new album, he points out, is the first he’s made without a single co-writer.)
Once he got going, Legend sought out Stevens, whose music he’d discovered when he was on a judging panel that awarded an industry prize to Stevens’ sprawling 2005 “Illinois” LP. In a sense the men’s careers have mirrored each other over the subsequent years: In 2006, Stevens released a beloved Christmas album, and he was nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for original song with the ghostly “Mystery of Love,” from Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name”; this past spring, a musical based on “Illinois” even opened on Broadway.
“To me, Sufjan’s music is relaxing and stimulating at the same time,” says Legend, whose real last name, as it happens, is Stephens. “And I wanted this to feel dreamy and whimsical and adventurous and fun.”
Legend sent voice-and-piano demos he cut at home to Stevens, who lives and works in New York’s Catskill Mountains; Stevens says Legend gave him “total creative freedom” to devise arrangements for the songs, which led the producer to thoughts of “Sesame Street” and the Muppets but also of Stevie Wonder, Henry Mancini, the Beatles and Serge Gainsbourg.
“I don’t have kids, so I’m not too aware of all the accoutrement of kids: the toys and the media and all that,” Stevens tells The Times in a rare phone interview. Instead, he pulled inspiration from music that naturally draws children, including the younger version of himself.
“The ’80s were one of the most colorful and cartoonish decades in pop history,” he says. “There was something very bright and primal about a lot of that stuff. I remember being like 5 and being really into Michael Jackson.”
That mindset sat well with Legend, who says he wanted the music on “My Favorite Dream” to meet “the same standards I apply to any of my songwriting.” His goal was achieving an “evergreen quality,” as he puts it, not least because he knows that might ensure that the songs find new audiences as successive generations of kids age out of the album.
Read more: Def Leppard's Joe Elliott on feeling like a 'fraud' and the 'insanity' of Taylor Swift
Indeed, Legend’s oldest, 8-year-old Luna, has moved beyond children’s music to embrace the pop star Tate McRae, thanks to a recent visit by an older cousin. “One of their other cousins was teaching them about the Drake-Kendrick beef,” Legend adds with a laugh. “So now my kids have thoughts on that.” (Luna wasn’t too old to contribute backing vocals along with her mom and her younger brother Miles to the album’s bouncy lead single, “L-O-V-E.”)
Even so, Stevens identifies an “emotional wisdom” in a song like “Safe” — in which Legend offers an assurance of protection “from harm here in my arms” — that an adult might respond to. Stevens himself did: Last September, not long after the death of his partner, Evans Richardson, Stevens revealed that he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that left him temporarily unable to walk.
“One of the main reasons I decided to do John’s album is because I hadn’t been able to really work on anything outside of self-care and rehabilitation,” he says. “I finally wanted to get back to work, but I didn’t really have the mental capacity to write my own music. This stuff felt wholesome and pure and safe.
“I think there’s also a general apocalyptic anxiety that pervades a lot of our culture today,” Stevens continues. “What I love about these songs is that they focus on the kinds of aphorisms that speak directly to our fears and worries. You don’t have to be a kid to appreciate what he’s singing about.”
Legend understands the cultural anxiety Stevens describes, particularly on the cusp of a presidential election that may well be won by Donald Trump, whom he describes as “awful for the country and awful for the world.” Yet the longtime Democratic activist is feeling newly buoyant now that Vice President Kamala Harris has replaced President Biden as the party’s nominee.
“Kamala’s just nailing it,” he says of the VP, whom he and Teigen have known since Harris’ days in California politics. “She’s bringing enthusiasm and joy and humor, and it’s working all around.”
Is Legend confident about America’s willingness to put a Black woman in the Oval Office?
“I feel like it’s gonna happen,” he says. “Before, it was two really old guys, and even though the policy differences couldn’t be more stark between Biden and Trump, I think it was hard for people to see the difference. Now, it’s very clear, and I think the comparison is very favorable for Kamala.”
Legend performed Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” at last week’s Democratic National Convention; next month he’ll hit the road for a handful of concerts in which he’ll play his hits while backed by an orchestra. He’s also finishing a second musical — he declines to name the subject other than to say it’s “a very high-profile person” and that the show involves rapping — and considering a tour to mark the 20th anniversary of his 2004 debut, “Get Lifted,” which won him the first three of his 12 Grammys. After our talk, he’s headed over to Saadiq’s studio to start work on his next R&B album.
“I’m in a place where I’m just responding to my life and letting it happen,” he says, be it music, politics, business or parenting. “And right now I’m in the thick of fatherhood.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
