Two decades after the release of his debut album, John Legend was at a point where children's music was probably inevitable.
The soft-spoken EGOT winner had already moved beyond his R&B label to make a Christmas record and compose his first musical; he had already served several seasons as a coach on “The Voice” and had accepted a job playing the son of God in a live television adaptation of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Plus: He and his wife, model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, have four children under the age of 9.
“It all started literally,” she says with a laugh, “when I played one of the songs on my daughter’s Fisher-Price playmat.”
While it’s easy to see how the convergence of Legend’s life and career led to the new “My Favorite Dream” — particularly considering how big his family is in Teigen’s business as a lifestyle maven with 42 million Instagram followers — few would have predicted that she would record the LP with Sufjan Stevens, the elusive indie-folk auteur known for his delicate singing and elaborate concept albums about American states.
“That’s what everyone says,” admits Legend, 45. “But I’ve been a fan of his for 20 years.”
The result of this unlikely collaboration, which will be released on Friday, is a collection of lush yet gentle songs, rich with choruses and peculiar chamber orchestra textures. The songs fall into two groups: up-tempo party tunes and bedtime lullabies; in addition to Legend's original songs, the album has covers of Bob Marley's “You Are My Sunshine” and “Three Little Birds.”
As unexpected as it was, Legend’s hiring of Stevens was actually the latest in a series of interesting decisions from an artist who got his start in the late ’90s and early 2000s playing on records by Lauryn Hill and Kanye West and scored his first No. 1 pop hit in 2014 with the stripped-down piano ballad “All of Me” at a time when such songs were scarce on the charts. He has since collaborated with producers Blake Mills and Raphael Saadiq on albums that lent a variety of frames to his polished singing.
Stevens comments: “It's a shape-shifting being. I could sense the curiosity behind what it does.”
For Legend, each new project represents “a process of discovery,” he says, sitting on a couch in a West Hollywood home that he and Teigen use as a creative headquarters. Upstairs is Legend’s recording studio; downstairs, a spacious kitchen where his wife develops recipes. Just inside the front door is one of those arcade games where you use a motorized claw to try to grab a stuffed toy.
“It’s not always clear what the outcome will 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 song about a purple monkey in a gumball tree, to his 1-year-old daughter, Esti.
“People were like, ‘John, why don’t you do more of this?’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t I?’” Legend says he considers himself a songwriter “at least as much” as a performer, so he began writing his own tunes based on “all the things we always talk about with the guys” — love, family, animals, nature. (The new album, he notes, is the first he’s made without a single co-writer.)
Once he got going, Legend sought out Stevens, whose music he had discovered when he served on a judging panel that gave an industry award to Stevens’ sprawling 2005 LP “Illinois.” In some ways, the men’s careers mirrored each other in the years since: In 2006, Stevens released a beloved Christmas album and 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”; last spring, a musical based on “Illinois” even opened on Broadway.
“For me, Sufjan’s music is soothing and uplifting at the same time,” says Legend, whose real last name, by the way, is Stephens. “And I wanted it to be dreamy, whimsical, adventurous and fun.”
Sufjan Stevens performs at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2017.
(Colin Young-Wolff/Invision/AP)
Legend sent vocal and piano demos he recorded at home to Stevens, who lives and works in New York's Catskill Mountains; Stevens says Legend gave him “total creative freedom” to come up with arrangements for the songs, leading the producer to think of “Sesame Street” and the Muppets, but also Stevie Wonder, Henry Mancini, the Beatles and Serge Gainsbourg.
“I don’t have kids, so I’m not very aware of all the stuff that surrounds kids — the toys and the media and all that,” Stevens tells The Times in a rare phone interview. Instead, he was inspired by music that naturally appeals to kids, 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 about 5 years old and loving Michael Jackson.”
That mindset suited Legend well, who says he wanted the music on “My Favorite Dream” to meet “the same standards I apply to any of my compositions.” His goal was to achieve an “everlasting quality,” as he puts it, especially since he knows that could ensure the songs find new audiences as successive generations of kids grow out of the album.
In fact, Legend’s eldest Luna, 8, has put aside children’s music in favor of pop star Tate McRae, thanks to a recent visit from an older cousin. “One of their other cousins was teaching them about the Drake-Kendrick feud,” Legend adds with a laugh. “So now my kids have ideas about it.” (Luna wasn’t too old to contribute backing vocals alongside her mother and younger brother Miles on the album’s upbeat lead single, “LOVE.”)
Still, 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, shortly 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 work on anything beyond self-care and rehab,” she says. “I finally wanted to get back to work, but I didn’t really have the mental capacity to write my own music. This material felt wholesome, pure and safe to me.
“I think there’s also a general apocalyptic anxiety that permeates much of our current culture,” Stevens continues. “What I love about these songs is that they focus on the kind of aphorisms that speak directly to our fears and worries. You don’t have to be a child to appreciate what he’s singing about.”
“My Favorite Dream” continues Legend’s forays into Christmas and theatrical music.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The legend understands the cultural anxiety Stevens describes, particularly on the eve of a presidential election that could well be won by Donald Trump, whom he describes as “terrible for the country and terrible for the world.” But the veteran Democratic activist feels newly encouraged now that Vice President Kamala Harris has replaced President Biden as the party’s nominee.
“Kamala is hitting the nail on the head,” he says of the vice president, whom he and Teigen have known since Harris’ days in California politics. “She’s bringing enthusiasm and joy and humor, and that’s working across the board.”
Is Legend confident that the United States will be willing to put a black woman in the Oval Office?
“I feel like it’s going to happen,” he says. “Before, they were two very old guys, and even though the political differences between Biden and Trump couldn’t be more stark, I think people had a hard time seeing the difference. Now, it’s very clear, and I think the comparison is very favorable to 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 series of concerts performing his hits backed by an orchestra. He’s also finishing up a second musical (he declines to discuss it except to say it’s about “a very well-known person” and the show includes rap) and is considering a tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his 2004 debut, “Get Lifted,” which earned him the first three of his 12 Grammys. After our chat, he’ll head to Saadiq’s studio to begin work on his next R&B album.
“I’m at a point where I just respond to my life and let it happen,” he says, whether it’s music, politics, business or parenting. “And right now I’m in the middle of parenthood.”
