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  • 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

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Alright ladies and gentlemen for those of you listening to the midday show I am DJ

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