00:00:15
Speaker 1: This is a gorgeous room.
00:00:21
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. I do a lot of songwriting in here.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I also have a studio where I record, but I've taken to writing here in this room. It first started during the pandemic, and I was writing for a musical called which is finally premiering.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: The musical that's... Imitation of Life. Right.
00:00:45
Speaker 3: So I first started writing songs in here for that. And then I wrote my children's album here.
00:00:50
Speaker 2: Wow.
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Speaker 3: And then I've been writing another musical. And almost all that songwriting has been happening here in this room.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: Was this room set up like this prior to the pandemic?
00:01:01
Speaker 3: This room was set up... Well, we moved here during the pandemic. And this room was always going to be like a piano bar.
00:01:07
Speaker 2: So we have a bar. We have.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: Behind the cameras... my awards here and everything. And this was always set up to be this room and a vibe. It's like my version of a musical man cave, I think. You know, if you wanted some whiskey or listen to some music, you come in here. We've got, you know, a record player in the room, some nice speakers, and it's a vibe.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. It really is. Do you feel better writing outside of the studio?
00:01:39
Speaker 3: When I'm writing by myself, I like to write here because I like how convenient it is. But also, I like that anytime inspiration strikes, I can just run back in here. And I only record it on my voice memos on my phone, so it's not any kind of sophisticated recording.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: But it gets the idea on.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: Tape, and then we can figure out what to do with it later.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: And then I do the proper recording at my studio.
00:02:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. The difference between writing so much writing happens with other people.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: You know, like, I don't know if that was exactly the case around your first album, get lifted. It always has been.
00:02:21
Speaker 3: I've never made an album where I didn't co-write except my children's album. So I wrote every original song on my children's album, but every other album I've made, every, every album has had lots of co-writing, uh, I've had individual songs that I've written by myself completely, but there's no album before that didn't include co-writing until I made the Children's album.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: But is it usually all in a room together?
00:02:49
Speaker 2: Often.
00:02:50
Speaker 3: So we didn't start using Zoom until the pandemic. But now you will have Zoom writing sessions. So for my Legend album, I had some Zoom writing sessions. For this album with Pharrell Muse, I've had some Zoom writing sessions. But before that, we were in a room together and often it would be me and a producer. So the producer is usually responsible for the instrumental, the beat, as we call it in hip hop and R & B parlance.
00:03:20
Speaker 2: And then.
00:03:22
Speaker 3: Myself and maybe another writer would be responsible for the top line. And so the top line is what we call the melody, the thing that's sung by the singer. So the melody and the lyric is the top line. And so I'm often responsible for that. Sometimes we'll have another top line writer join me. But usually there's a producer making a beat or an instrumental and the top line writers write what I sing.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: And so you're sort of listening as as either two beats or as the beats coming together.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: Thinking of ideas.
00:03:54
Speaker 3: So sometimes producers will have kind of a library of beats together. that they think are appropriate for you and they'll play them for you. And then you'll say, Oh, let's work with that one. That sounds good. Uh, and doesn't mean the beat is stuck at that spot.
00:04:09
Speaker 2: It may evolve.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: We may add live instrumentation, um, and tweak it a bit, move things around. Uh, but those are at least ideas to get the thoughts started. And then we start to write the top line to it. And usually they'll play those beats. Uh, sometimes they'll make them in the room, like, uh, When I was writing with Anderson. Paak, we made the beat there in the room.
00:04:32
Speaker 2: We were just jamming. I was on the keys. He was on the drums.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: And I think a couple other instrumentalists were in the room, and we were just jamming. And we came up with what we came up with in the room. Same thing when I worked with the Free Nationals, who were.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Part of his crew.
00:04:50
Speaker 3: But other times, the producers will have the beats already ready, and you just listen to a bunch. and see what inspires you. And I'll usually record a mumble track to either my phone or I'll go in the booth or we'll have a little handheld mic and I'll just mumble a bunch of melodies over the instrumentals and see what feels right. Sometimes I'll be like, oh, that melody really works. Sometimes I'll say, I like this aspect of that melody, but I'll use this aspect of the other melody and kind of piece the song together. And once I've figured out what the form of the song will be, so the melody, the structure, and sort of a little bit of the concept, then I'll start to finish out the lyric and flesh it out, flesh out the storytelling, and complete the song.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: It's amazing too, because it feels like, just thinking about on the new album, a song like Pray For Ya, which I can't get out of my head, to be honest.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: That contrasting that with say, uh, there's a song you did with, I can't remember the name now, but it was, it was a song you did with, um, Sergio Mendez, you know, and it's like both great songs, but one far more sort of complex than the other. And it sort of seems like you're able to write to something really simple, like pray for you or something a little more harmonically, maybe complex. Yeah.
00:06:19
Speaker 3: Pray for you has an interesting, um, progeny because, um, It started out.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: In a session with Usher.
00:06:30
Speaker 3: So if you listen to the background vocals, the, oh, hey, that's Usher singing those from the original version.
00:06:38
Speaker 2: Of the song.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: And it had basically the same melody that I'm singing now, but it had a different beat back then. And we changed the lyric to make it feel like it fit me and my point of view a little bit more.
00:06:53
Speaker 2: But it started....
00:06:55
Speaker 3: As kind of the bones of that song started in an Usher session. And that's why you'll still hear some of his backing vocals on it. And then the melody was kind of already established in that session. And then when we rewrote the lyric, we adhered to that melody still. So I didn't really write any of the melodies, but I wrote a lot of the lyrics in the new version of the song. And that's what you hear in the completed version is a lot of my lyrical ideas, but a lot of Pharrell's melodic ideas that he wrote.
00:07:29
Speaker 2: To a beat that he created.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: And is that you playing on that? Or is that Pharrell?
00:07:34
Speaker 3: It's me playing at the end of the song, the piano. But a lot of the track isn't piano driven. It's, you know, the 808 and the bass and some keyboards.
00:07:47
Speaker 2: And things and some strings that I didn't play.
00:07:50
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:07:51
Speaker 1: It's wild because you're such an adept sort of self-contained. You don't need anyone else on the one hand. But on the other hand, you are the sort of consummate collaborator.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: Oh, I love collaborating.
00:08:04
Speaker 3: And I think I can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to songwriting, playing piano, vocals, obviously.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: But I love collaborating. I love seeing the result of.
00:08:20
Speaker 3: two different energies and two different areas of expertise coming in a room together and seeing what we do together, it's exciting and interesting. And it gives you the chance to renew yourself, I think, in ways that you wouldn't always be able to do by yourself. I think having new energy to react to and to bounce off of.
00:08:46
Speaker 2: Helps you stay fresh.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: And you have such a style. You have your own style as a player. Pharrell also, I mean, I don't think he's quite a piano player like you are. But he has a style. He has a style, right?
00:08:59
Speaker 2: He definitely has a style.
00:09:00
Speaker 3: I mean, he's been producing massive records for like 30 years. And I think people recognize his style when they hear it. And that's what you want as a producer. You want to have an identity as a producer. And he certainly has one.
00:09:16
Speaker 1: Was it interesting to work with someone like fro who does have such a um signature almost melodic sort.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: Of uh-huh well i think it's fun because like i said i think it gives you gives me the chance to do something new even though we'd worked together a couple times before we never done anything this thorough and deep as a collaboration and uh uh doing an entire album with him allowed me to create something that felt fresh and different from the rest of my repertoire um but still enough connective tissue that it That it didn't sound like foreign to my repertoire, but it still sounded new and fresh and like a really urgent and necessary addition to my repertoire.
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. At first, was there any trepidation around, well, maybe I can't mess with this exact melody.
00:10:05
Speaker 2: That Pharrell did?
00:10:07
Speaker 3: Some people on my label were like, you got to be careful with Pharrell because it could sound so much like Pharrell that it doesn't sound like you anymore. And some people on my team were saying that, but I wasn't worried about that. I think I just went in saying, we're going to get in the room And we're going to figure it out.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: We're going to make it sound great.
00:10:32
Speaker 3: We're like two really experienced, creative people who have a track record of making really great music. And how could it not be great? We're going to make something great together. And I wasn't really worried about having too much of his influence or whatever. I just figured I have so much of a point of view that it was going to get expressed musically in the album. And I think when you listen to it, it sounds like the two of us came together instead of one or the other taking over creatively.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: And you really feel that happened without too much consternation or dialogue even.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: And we had dialogue. We had, you know, like, does this work for you? Does this work for you?
00:11:13
Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah.
00:11:14
Speaker 3: And sometimes we would disagree about, you know, should this instrument stay there or should we rewrite this lyric?
00:11:23
Speaker 2: And we figured it out. And my goal was.
00:11:25
Speaker 3: for every record is just let the music win it's not about anybody's ego it's not about um it's.
00:11:31
Speaker 2: No like pride in owning.
00:11:35
Speaker 3: The best idea i just want the best idea to win um and so um hopefully the evidence is in the record that we let the best ideas win what.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: Were some of those conversations i mean was there a common denominator between those conversations where where if you're having a conversation on a given song about maybe stripping back an instrument or adding an instrument or something, was there, at the end of the day, like a mission statement you could go back to and sort of say, well, this idea is probably best because it serves what we're trying to do?
00:12:05
Speaker 3: Well, I think from the beginning, Pharrell came to me with the concept for the album that it would sound classic with beautiful orchestration and strings and horns and sound like the classics but with 808 beats and like a hip hop foundation underneath.
00:12:26
Speaker 2: And I think the only times.
00:12:29
Speaker 3: We really had choices and disagreements were around how much.
00:12:36
Speaker 2: Of the classic side to keep versus.
00:12:39
Speaker 3: Stripping it down a little bit more. So sometimes we will have recorded a bunch of horns and we only use like 20% of what we recorded on certain songs, a bunch of orchestration, and cut it back in certain areas. So I think a lot of times that's a lot of what producing is, and a lot of what arranging is, is not only knowing what to add, but knowing what to take away. And so a lot of our conversations were, well, does this need to be here? Should we take it away and make it sound a little grittier and not as pretty, maybe? But more effective because it's grittier and in that balance between the hip-hop and the classic, maybe hip-hop needs to win a little more sometimes. And so these were some of the conversations we were having and I'm so pleased with where we landed on every track.
00:13:38
Speaker 2: I think we got the balance right on every track.
00:13:42
Speaker 1: Where were you in the balance?
00:13:44
Speaker 3: It could go either way. But Pharrell's a producer and he made the beats so Um, he made the drums and the 808s and the, uh, and a lot of the kind of, uh, the, um, the foundation for a lot of the tracks. And so sometimes he would, you know, want us to not distract from that foundation with all the pretty sounds. And, you know, eventually, you know, we compromise on some of it. We kept some of the things I wanted and took away some of the things I wanted. And then we finally landed where we needed to land.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: I'll say a song like everything feels like to me, after having listened a few times, everything started to symbolize the, what I started to imagine was the negotiation that might've happened on the album because it felt like, and maybe I'm wrong, but it's such a, it's one of the songs that sounds like it could have produced differently, probably been on any one of your projects. But then there's this like, in this Basquiat kind of fashion, like these 808s that will be.
00:14:45
Speaker 3: Like, Well, I loved that song from the beginning because it sounded different than just a straight ballad. I liked the 808s kind of dirtying it up a bit and not making it sound so pristine. I think that was what attracted me to it from the beginning. All we added on that song, and there was no really debate about it, was adding the strings. Pharrell always envisioned that song having an orchestral arrangement too. But I think what sold me on the song from the beginning was that juxtaposition between sounding like a typical John Legend ballad, but having the 808s, it felt right.
00:15:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really stark, the difference between the two approaches on that song.
00:15:38
Speaker 3: It's funny because when I played it for Terrace Martin, who was involved in arranging all the horns on the album, when I played it for him, he said, this sounds like what the thesis was going into the album of matching that classic with the 808s.
00:15:55
Speaker 2: He said, this sounds like this is what you guys were aiming for.
00:15:58
Speaker 1: Amazing. So how much of that song was done before you came to it?
00:16:05
Speaker 3: I only rewrote a little bit of the lyric and Pharrell wrote most of it. And this happened right after the fires here. So you listen to the lyric. You know, I live in Los Angeles, but he was living in Paris and still is. But he was watching the news and a lot of his friends live here in Los Angeles. And he wrote a song where the first verse is really talking.
00:16:26
Speaker 2: About the mountains being on fire.
00:16:28
Speaker 3: And losing one's home and but still having the love of your life and and knowing how important that is beyond any material things.
00:16:38
Speaker 2: And so he wrote that idea.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: And in some ways, I was hesitant to put it out at that time, because he was like, man, we should just put it out now, because it's so timely.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: And I was like, you know, it feels so raw in LA, like, because I live here.
00:16:53
Speaker 3: And everything feels so raw, that I didn't want to feel like we were exploiting the tragedy here.
00:17:01
Speaker 2: But I figured if the song.
00:17:04
Speaker 3: worked it should work at any time and and shouldn't need to come out um right after the fires happen um and i think the song still works and uh it feels timeless.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: Yeah it does because in the context of the album now that you say that of course that could eat very of course that's the genesis or you know i can see how that could be the genesis but in the context of the album it doesn't sound tied to any particular current event.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: I love that it feels timeless still, even though we were writing it in a moment that it was inspired directly by that moment. I had friends who lost their homes, visited communities where their homes were lost, visited firemen who were in the trenches. And so all that was so raw to this whole community. And what I hoped was that the song didn't need to be tied to that time and that it could feel timeless and classic.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: And I think we accomplished that.
00:18:01
Speaker 1: Definitely did. Definitely did. So take me back to the genesis of the whole thing. You mentioned it was Pharrell's idea. And I should also say that the album has been done for a while. So you've been living with it.
00:18:15
Speaker 3: So most of the album has been done. We mixed it back in the late spring. But the recording all happened basically in 2025.
00:18:24
Speaker 2: So very little of it.
00:18:26
Speaker 3: Happened in 2026. And so we've been sitting on it for a while. It feels like a secret, you know?
00:18:33
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool. I mean, it's a luxury in a way to have, you know.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we just wanted to get everything in order. I changed management during that time. And I just wanted to make sure that the machine that would be responsible for marketing, it was a well-oiled machine and ready to execute. And I didn't want to waste this music and not have everything on the business side in order before we did it. So we waited to get everything right before we tried to release it. It started back in December 2024. Pharrell called me. He calls me very early because he lives in Paris and I live nine hours before him earlier than him so you know when it's uh noon his time it's 3 a.m here um and uh he called me probably like 4 or 5 a.m la time and i did not pick up but i i called him back when i woke up and um he said what are you working on man i i i'm so inspired by your voice and he was really reacting to what i had done on um uh birds don't sing the song we did with clips and um That song was the opening song on their comeback album. Um, and it was really meaningful to clips themselves, but also to Pharrell and, um, he was like man i'm just so inspired by your voice i want to do a whole album with you what are you doing what are you working on when are you coming to paris uh can you just come here and camp out and we make an album together and i was like you know uh i have a home i have four kids i can't really like just live in paris um I don't know.
00:20:17
Speaker 1: Wife and kids might not mind so much.
00:20:21
Speaker 3: But I said, I will be coming out there in January of 2025.
00:20:27
Speaker 1: Only a month later.
00:20:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, a month later.
00:20:29
Speaker 3: And maybe we could spend a few days working together then, and then we'll see how it goes and then decide what we're going to do from there. So it started with that. And then he sent me Daylight, so our first single. He sent me a version of that that I rewrote a little bit, but it was basically the song that it is now when he sent it to me.
00:20:52
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, wow, this is.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: Like we're off to a good start before we even started writing together. And I recorded a version of Daylight here in L.A. And then I went to Paris and we wrote a few new songs together. We wrote, I think, Next Time during that session. We did Muse together during that session and a couple other tracks that made the album.
00:21:13
Speaker 2: And then I went back home.
00:21:16
Speaker 3: Then I came back to Paris and we did some more writing. We did some sessions via Zoom.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: Me here in L.A.
00:21:22
Speaker 3: At my studio and him there in Paris. Him being in Paris means at the Louis Vuitton offices. They built a studio there in the offices. So he's the creative director for the men at Louis Vuitton. And you walk through all the design team. They're all creating sketches and all these things.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: And then you go to the end of the.
00:21:43
Speaker 3: Hall and there's this music studio where Pharrell creates.
00:21:49
Speaker 2: And does he always work?
00:21:52
Speaker 3: I think he's always going back and forth between being a musician and being a fashion designer.
00:21:57
Speaker 2: And what a creative space he's created. Beautiful view of the Seine River in front of you.
00:22:06
Speaker 3: And it's an inspiring place to make music or create anything, I think.
00:22:11
Speaker 4: Wild.
00:22:12
Speaker 1: So had this been something you guys had even previewed with each other before, talked about as a possibility?
00:22:16
Speaker 2: Well, we had worked together before.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: We wrote a song together called It's Over for my Evolver album. And we wrote another song together during that time called Aim High. I didn't use it on Evolver. I ended up using it as a bonus track on Love in the Future. And so we'd written together a little bit before, but never spent a whole lot.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Of time together.
00:22:40
Speaker 3: And we'd known each other for couple of decades, but never really like dug in and, and, and worked on a full project together.
00:22:47
Speaker 2: And, uh, so this was a new thing to do.
00:22:51
Speaker 3: Um, I had been signed to Kanye's production company for most of the beginning of my career. So anytime I was working deeply with one producer back then, it was usually with Kanye. And then, uh, I'd worked with, um, Blake Mills on darkness and light work with Sufjan Stevens on, um, my children's album. I worked with, uh, Amir and the roots for wake up. And so I'd done kind of full albums with one producer before, um, but, um, never with Pharrell. And, uh, it was exciting as an idea. It felt like we could do something fresh and, and exciting, um, together. And, and I was so into what he was doing with clips. And, uh, I just felt like, uh, this was the right time for us to do this together.
00:23:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it's what you're going, you mentioned your collaborations with Kanye, um, And when I first was listening to this record, I was like, wow, this really is like a left turn or just a different sort of.
00:23:49
Speaker 2: It sounds new, yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: But then I started listening to it more and I started thinking just about all... And I started listening back to all your other projects as well. In some ways, it's like the inverse of your very first project where that one felt like you are the sort of... artist in the mold of like a r & b singer songwriter um classic you know it's classic sort of r & b that had this that had like you know that was then produced to sound of the time you know and.
00:24:18
Speaker 3: It was like and it was a both i think both get lifted and this album have some similarities in the sense that there's like hip-hop drums and a hip-hop kind of uh foundation but uh soul songwriting and classic songwriting that's meant to be timeless. I just think Kanye's version of what hip-hop drums sound like is different.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: From Pharrell's version. Pharrell's version is a.
00:24:45
Speaker 3: Little more 808s and a little more electronic sounding, and Kanye's were more like sample drum loops and things of that nature back then. So I think there's some similarities, but also Pharrell has such a sonic signature that you can hear that And that's what makes it different from any other producers.
00:25:07
Speaker 2: Totally.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: And because of that, the difference between them, it sounds much more like these were songs, like current modern songs where you're adding classic elements and Get Lifted felt almost like the inverse of that, the opposite of that, which was like, these are these classic songs and let's add some hip hop, you know, and how much hip hop can we add.
00:25:25
Speaker 2: Or, you know. Yeah.
00:25:27
Speaker 3: And either way, I think it's cool to work with these kinds of producers that have that lean a different way than I would lean personally because it pushes me and it adds flavor to what I would do in a way that.
00:25:45
Speaker 2: I think makes the record better.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So you said this record started with Daylight. Mm-hmm. Do you remember how it came to you?
00:25:53
Speaker 3: He sent me a demo of it. He sent me a demo and it was in Sam Henshaw's voice. Sam Henshaw is a singer and songwriter from the U.K., um, Afro British guy. And, uh, he, um, sang a beautiful version of it. So it already set the bar high. I'm like, let me not fuck this up. Um, and I changed a couple of lines, uh, particularly in the hook, um, and a couple of lines in the verse.
00:26:21
Speaker 2: And, uh, and then I sang it and, uh, it.
00:26:24
Speaker 3: Felt really good. It felt, um, like it was already like a single. I was like, man, this could be out right now. And I'd be excited that this was the first song of this project. And it ended up being the first song for the project. But, you know, like 18 months later. Did they send a chart over or did you just sit down with it? Oh, no one sends charts. I'm not not in our genre. I don't know if other genres send charts, but we don't send charts. Everything's really basically by ear and and you hear it and they'll send like a lyric sheet over.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: But that's it.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that a lot of the songs are less piano forward than your other ones. Is that one that you'll be able to tour and do it in the same manner?
00:27:12
Speaker 2: Oh, sure.
00:27:12
Speaker 3: I mean, I'll tour with the full band for this album, so we'll be able to represent the full arrangements on the tracks.
00:27:19
Speaker 1: Will you be playing with them, though? Did you have to learn them? Oh, yeah.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: I mean, that's part of the arrangement on the song.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: So that'll be in the performance of the song and it's on the record too.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: And, you know, it'll be a full arrangement on tour.
00:27:47
Speaker 3: And I play piano on just about every track, at least a little bit of piano on every track.
00:27:52
Speaker 1: Get Back to Bodies on the Floor is a great stretch of the album. It's like really strong.
00:27:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, it gets very, I think we wanted the whole album to feel cinematic and particularly that part of the album. When Pharrell pitched the idea of the album to me, he was like, I want to make some Black James Bond shit. And I feel like Get Back is like the quintessential Black James Bond record. And then a lot of the storytelling in the heart of the album that starts with Get Back is that kind of intrigue and the ups and downs of a relationship And it feels like the stakes are high and there's a lot of urgency and bodies on the floor kind of culminates that with this war, uh, metaphor, um, uh, for a relationship. Uh, and really I was watching, uh, mob land this, the paramount plus show when I wrote the lyric for bodies on the floor. And I was just envisioning like this cycle of retribution and violence and, and, um, nobody really winning because, uh, everybody gets harmed when it comes down to that. And, uh, and then applying that to this relationship that we're exploring in the whole.
00:29:13
Speaker 2: Album, which is a, is it a toxic relationship?
00:29:17
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:29:18
Speaker 3: You know, like, uh, get back is like her cheating on another guy to be with you and then going back to him. And then, uh, Under the Bridge is about two people betraying each other and kind of one-upping each other with revenge and asking for forgiveness. And then Next Time is kind of exploring the possibility that in another life you could get back together. and then bodies on the floor is like fuck it we probably shouldn't we probably shouldn't do this I'm tired of fighting but then at the end of it it's.
00:30:00
Speaker 2: Like all is fair in love and war what am.
00:30:03
Speaker 3: I still jealous for I let you leave but I can't let you go Is there someone else?
00:30:09
Speaker 2: No, I don't want to know.
00:30:11
Speaker 3: Can't see those hands on your body. Is it the me or nobody? But is the good worth the bad? Do I miss what we had so much that I need.
00:30:18
Speaker 2: It right back? Late night call. Do you miss me at all?
00:30:24
Speaker 4: It's like.
00:30:26
Speaker 2: You know, it's intriguing.
00:30:27
Speaker 1: You might have to star in your musical. I was going to say that. I don't know how far along you are into that thing, but you might need to be on top of that.
00:30:36
Speaker 3: But yeah, I love the storytelling in it because it feels like the stakes are high and there's a lot of like urgency and.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: I feel like it leaves the audience wondering what happens next.
00:30:46
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:47
Speaker 1: And it's such a classic, like, I mean, you brought up Usher before, like confessions as like a concept. I mean, it's like, you know, it holds up to this day. You listen to that and you're just like, Oh my God.
00:30:54
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: I think people got wrapped up in the story.
00:30:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. Although I guess, thankfully for you on, on, on this one, it's, it's, uh, you were able to write maybe more just from, uh, uh, I don't know if it was probably not about someone else, but you were able to write from a detached.
00:31:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:31:08
Speaker 3: I feel like, Us doing it together and both of us having a lot to do with the songwriting allowed us to kind of.
00:31:16
Speaker 2: Have a little bit of creative distance from it in a way.
00:31:18
Speaker 3: Like, I feel like we were kind of writing a movie together and writing the soundtrack to the movie together. And both of us are in, I'm not going to speak for Pharrell, but what I assume are stable relationships.
00:31:31
Speaker 2: We have four kids.
00:31:32
Speaker 3: Each of us have four kids and, you know, we're family, man. And my relationship with Chrissy has nowhere near the level of ups and downs that this couple in our album has. But we wanted to be creative and cinematic. And I felt like the storytelling needed to feel cinematic, too.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Was that something you had to preview for your wife?
00:31:55
Speaker 2: I told her, don't take this personally.
00:32:00
Speaker 1: Listen, we wrote some songs. They're not about.
00:32:02
Speaker 2: I was like, she'll know.
00:32:03
Speaker 3: She knows it's not about us because it doesn't sound like anything we're going through.
00:32:08
Speaker 2: And so she knows that.
00:32:09
Speaker 3: But it's interesting because obviously I've written songs about us and our relationship. Very famously, all of me, I wrote when we got engaged and we're about to get married.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: And she has been my muse for a lot of my career.
00:32:23
Speaker 3: Um, but naming an album Muse and then it not being about her is interesting.
00:32:28
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
00:32:30
Speaker 3: It's a choice, um, that, you know, I had to explain, but, uh, okay, well, when did Muse, when did Muse enter the equation as like a, cause that.
00:32:40
Speaker 1: Sort of becomes the, the, the, the spine, I guess.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: And we, we, we recorded the song before we knew that that was the album title.
00:32:49
Speaker 2: Um, we had some other ideas for the album.
00:32:50
Speaker 3: Title, but, uh, Muse is what we settled on because it did feel like we were following this story of the artist and his muse throughout. And then we looked up, you know, the history of the term muse. And, you know, in Greek mythology, these nine goddesses who inspired everything, art, culture, science, each of them were kind of responsible for a different discipline in Greek mythology. And we just thought about, you know, making this album in Paris with, you know, with fashion design happening down the hall and looking out on, you know, the beauty of this city with all this art and architecture and all these amazing things. Muse just felt like it captured the spirit and the energy of the album really well.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: And we opened the album with that track Muse.
00:33:42
Speaker 3: And then we follow the artist and his muse throughout the album. And I felt like that was the way to capture what this album meant and the energy of the album.
00:33:53
Speaker 1: You then sequenced the tracks around that sort of.
00:33:57
Speaker 2: We.
00:33:57
Speaker 3: Sequenced the tracks before we decided the album was called Muse. But it just all made sense. The sequencing made sense with the storyline. And then the album title made sense as well.
00:34:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. You were talking about being in Paris and Pharrell's studio in... The Louis Vuitton office and this design happening. I mean, you hear about Pharrell being the creative director of Louis Vuitton. But how is it actually like seeing that? I mean, even for you, I imagine who, you know, you've been a creative person most of your adult life. But that has to be a pretty unique space to create in.
00:34:35
Speaker 2: Well, it's very cool. And, you know, it's not.
00:34:38
Speaker 3: You know, it's not that foreign because, you know, Kanye was always doing fashion when we were working together. Virgil Abloh was in our orbit a lot. He designed my album cover for Love in the Future. And so we'd always had.
00:34:55
Speaker 2: The fashion world around us while we were making music over the years. But, you know, this is.
00:35:01
Speaker 3: Pretty much the pinnacle of, you know, that collaboration, you know, having someone working for one of the most important fashion houses in the world. And making an album literally at the same time in the same place is pretty special.
00:35:17
Speaker 2: And so even.
00:35:18
Speaker 3: Though I'd touched those worlds before, this was the deepest immersion into that world.
00:35:24
Speaker 1: It's like the height of both worlds.
00:35:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker 3: And then top it off with the first time anyone heard a song from the album, it was at the fashion show for, for Louis Vuitton in January of 2026. Right, to pray for you there. I'm at the show. All these celebrities are there. All these fashion writers are there. And I hear the orchestra warming up. And I hear chords that I recognize. And I knew he was going to play the song, but I didn't know what order he was going to play it in. And the first song played in the show was Pray For You. And so that's like, this is.
00:36:01
Speaker 3: All the reason you would do an album with Pharrell Williams, creative director of Louis Vuitton Men. You're like, this is why you want to do this, because you're making amazing music, and then you get a chance to debut it.
00:36:12
Speaker 2: In a way that no one else could.
00:36:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:36:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:36:15
Speaker 1: I mean, the album cover, I imagine, had to be somewhat... The album cover is beautiful. It had to be.
00:36:21
Speaker 2: A lot of this was Pharrell's vision. He said he had this vision.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Of me and a brigade of black men playing... orchestral instruments behind me with me on an upright piano. Like he told me that early in the project. And when we shot the video for Fireflies, that's what we assembled was this brigade of black men playing strings and horns and then an 808 machine. And then we made that the album cover as well. And it just represents the vision that we had for the project from the beginning.
00:37:03
Speaker 1: Wow. Is there something from the album that you could play a little bit of?
00:37:08
Speaker 2: Sure. What do you want to hear?
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
00:37:10
Speaker 3: We just made the video for Bodies on the Floor.
00:37:14
Speaker 1: You did?
00:37:15
Speaker 5: Heard the sound of the sirens Penetrating the silence Are we doing this again?
00:37:25
Speaker 2: Tell me this is not how it ends.
00:37:28
Speaker 5: Broken glass on the counter, not another encounter.
00:37:35
Speaker 2: We go round for round, pound for pound, over and over and over.
00:37:45
Speaker 4: After all we've lost, it only costs some things we just.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: Can't afford to say.
00:37:59
Speaker 6: I can't keep repeating, so I'm retreating.
00:38:06
Speaker 2: I can't find a reason.
00:38:08
Speaker 6: For me to stay. All this blood on the table and bodies on the floor. It's a war, it's a war that I don't want to fight no more. Only heaven can save us. Stretch my hands to the Lord. The choice is yours as a war that we don't have to fight no more. They say all is fair in love and war. But what am I still jealous for? I let you leave, I can't let you go. There's someone else I don't want to know. Can't see those hands on your body. It's either me or nobody But is the good worth the bad?
00:39:01
Speaker 2: Do I miss what we had?
00:39:03
Speaker 6: So much that I need it right back.
00:39:07
Speaker 2: After all this.
00:39:09
Speaker 6: Time Can't get you off my mind Maybe I drank too much and I Just need you tonight Late night call Do you miss me at all? We'll get back together, no regrets Until the morning light When there's blood on the table.
00:39:37
Speaker 2: And bodies on the floor.
00:39:41
Speaker 1: It's a war, it's.
00:39:42
Speaker 6: A war That I don't want to fight no more Girl, only heaven can save us Stretch my hands to the Lord The choice is yours, it's a war we don't have to fight no more sir we don't have to fight no more we don't have to fight no more.
00:40:09
Speaker 2: Choice is yours as a war and.
00:40:11
Speaker 5: We don't have to fight no more oh man oh.
00:40:21
Speaker 1: You know in your head, like theoretically, John Legend's talented. You know, John Legend's talented. You see him, you're like, oh, like, this motherfucker's talented.
00:40:30
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:40:31
Speaker 1: Like, dang, man. Do you have to work on your voice?
00:40:35
Speaker 3: I work on it all the time. I warm up. I didn't warm up today, but if I have a show, you know, I'm very conscientious of the physical toll that touring takes on my voice, so I'm very careful i don't drink on tour um lots of water and tea and and uh warming up cooling down um you have to treat yourself like an athlete like a high high performance athlete um focus on your voice but um you're relying on your body to perform every night uh or four or five nights a week and so you have to do the things to take care of it make sure you You don't.
00:41:23
Speaker 2: Jeopardize your moneymaker.
00:41:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, framing it like an athlete is probably the right way because, I mean, your voice in person.
00:41:30
Speaker 3: Honestly, I think of myself as an athlete all the time. And when I'm a big sports fan, I'm not a good athlete.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: Good singer.
00:41:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, but when my favorite players get injured, I'm immediately empathizing and thinking about my voice and how I would feel.
00:41:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. with the same parallel injury in my field, I'm already, my.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: Brain goes exactly to that place and it's almost like I feel their pain when it's their hamstring or their knee or whatever it is, I connect it to the way I feel when my voice isn't operating the way it should.
00:42:12
Speaker 1: Do you think, because you have both, you have the ability to play as well as you sing, Basically, there's probably about equal. Do they feel connected? Could you do one without the other as well in your mind? Or do you see yourself as both?
00:42:27
Speaker 3: I think of myself more as a singer-songwriter than a pianist. I think piano is a little bit below singer-songwriter for me. And there are times when I'm on tour where I let my band play and I just sing. And I enjoy those times. And there are times when every song doesn't need a piano part. And so I think of myself a little bit more as a singer songwriter.
00:42:51
Speaker 2: Than a pianist.
00:42:52
Speaker 3: And I'm also around a lot of people who can really play the piano, like with a higher level of virtuosity than I can. But I do feel good about my piano playing. I think I have a really good feel and my style works really well for the songs that I write.
00:43:07
Speaker 2: But I know so many better pianists than I am.
00:43:10
Speaker 1: I don't know if Elton John would sit here and say that.
00:43:16
Speaker 3: I feel like my percentile as a singer-songwriter is higher than my percentile as a pianist.
00:43:23
Speaker 2: I got you.
00:43:23
Speaker 1: I got you. I got you. Do you work out the piano still?
00:43:27
Speaker 3: I play all the time just because I'm writing in this room a lot and playing in that sense.
00:43:33
Speaker 2: But I don't do a lot of, I guess... exercises to practice.
00:43:38
Speaker 3: But I'm always playing because I'm always using it as a tool to write.
00:43:44
Speaker 1: Has it ever happened where you hear something that intrigues you, a song, where there's a piano line that intrigues you and you think, I want to try to... And it's caused you to stretch a bit?
00:43:54
Speaker 3: I mean, anything Nina Simone does, I love the way she plays. And I am not able to do it like she does. She was a really classically trained pianist. I had a little bit of classical training, but she spent a lot more time doing it to the point where she was auditioning to get into Curtis and other music conservatories. And she was going as a pianist. She wasn't trying to be a vocalist at the time. And she was really focused on being a pianist. Whereas with me, I think piano was never my first priority and I was never training to be at that level of playing piano. I just wanted to be comfortable accompanying myself as a singer-songwriter.
00:44:40
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard you approximate Nina's playing, though.
00:44:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've tried, but I know that I can't do exactly what she did. I'm sure if I spend a lot of time working on it, but I just have never prioritized that aspect of my skill as a performer enough to get as good as she got at it.
00:44:57
Speaker 1: Do you, so some of the guys you're around that you say are, you know, guys and gals, you say you've been around that maybe.
00:45:02
Speaker 3: Like my musical director, Eugene Man Man Roberts, he's like virtuosic pianist and can play anything, can solo, he can play jazz, soul, hip hop, reggae, whatever. He's incredible. And, you know, he can do a lot on the keys that I can't do.
00:45:20
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:45:20
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:45:21
Speaker 1: What about a guy like Stevie Wonder, who might also be in the vein? I mean, maybe more on the verge of... More singer-songwriter than necessarily. But you've played... Actually, I've seen you play with Stevie. How is Stevie as a player?
00:45:34
Speaker 3: What I love about Stevie as a player was he was really introducing a lot of chord structures and progressions that were signature to his style to soul music. And so he was so innovative, I think, as a keyboard player, and he was not just playing piano.
00:45:52
Speaker 2: Often he was playing electric, kind of.
00:45:54
Speaker 3: Early electric keyboards like the Rhodes and the Wurlitzer and those synthesizers in their early iterations. So he was doing a lot of innovation, and the chords he was composing were so interesting and different for soul music to the point where when you hear them, you're like, oh, those are Stevie chords. I heard Robert Glasper talking about it, and he was talking about how Stevie has a specific singing style that is so signature to him. He has a specific songwriting style, specific way of playing that's so specific to him. And that's why he's such a genius and so impactful as an artist because he innovated and created a signature in multiple areas of making music that all of us are still looking at as the quintessential soul music that that can be made by a male R & B or whatever singer. He is the blueprint.
00:46:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:46:55
Speaker 1: And you know what? To add to what Robert said too, it's like you listen to Stevie, he also has a very unique to him sense of rhythm too.
00:47:04
Speaker 2: And by the way, Robert mentioned he played the drums on a lot of those tracks too.
00:47:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his drum playing is phenomenal, but it doesn't sound like any other drummer. Yeah, it's like he was so.
00:47:13
Speaker 3: himself and so influential because a lot of people came after him that tried to sound like him, but nobody sounded like him before him.
00:47:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:47:20
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that too, listening to this record, because Pharrell is similar in that way. Pharrell has a really unique sense of rhythm. It's unique to him.
00:47:28
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:47:29
Speaker 3: And similar to Stevie in the sense that when you hear a Pharrell record, you know it's him. And if you hear someone that sounds like him, you know they're trying to sound like him.
00:47:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:47:40
Speaker 3: And... I think it's great for a producer to have that kind of identity as a creator that they.
00:47:49
Speaker 2: Have a signature. It doesn't mean everything sounds the same.
00:47:51
Speaker 3: It just means that they have a real identity and a point of view as a producer.
00:47:57
Speaker 1: In your view, do you feel like you have a signature or something that.
00:47:59
Speaker 3: I think people, when they hear my compositions, they hear my voice in those compositions.
00:48:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: Like when I'm writing for Broadway, other people are singing my songs and But my friend.
00:48:11
Speaker 2: Who has collaborated with me over the years.
00:48:14
Speaker 3: And produced some of my records, he went to one of our workshops presentations. He was like, oh, I hear your songwriting voice all over this project. I hear the John Legend-isms throughout. And I think that's because I do have a signature style as a singer and a songwriter. And you can hear those characteristics even when someone else is singing it.
00:48:36
Speaker 1: And even when you're writing, because writing for Broadway is probably very different i imagine but i.
00:48:40
Speaker 3: But i didn't want it to sound like i was trying to write for broadway like i wanted it just to sound like great music um and uh and write from my own point of view as a musician and so you'll hear connective tissue between the the songs i've written for pop music and and what i wrote for theater and uh You'll hear that. You'll hear a lot of my signature as a, as a, as a songwriter, uh, as a, you know, as a stylist.
00:49:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. Tell me about writing a musical. I mean, I knew of one, Imitation of Life, which is, like you mentioned, you wrote early on in the pandemic and it's, it's, it's coming soon.
00:49:20
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's about to hit the theater on November 21st, at The Shed. It'll be off-Broadway and then hopefully eventually on-Broadway. And then we're writing another show called Boom For Real, which is about the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his legacy. A major character is also his father who took over his legacy when he passed away. And his father's efforts to reconcile with taking over his legacy but not really being heavily involved in.
00:49:56
Speaker 2: His career when he was alive. It's an interesting show.
00:50:01
Speaker 3: I'm writing it with Marcus Gardley and I'm really excited for that too. The music is different because Imitation of Life is based in the 20s and 30s and then the music for this is based in the time when Jean-Michel was alive so the 60s, 70s and 80s.
00:50:19
Speaker 1: Wow. And so do you cover that sort of territory in terms of the sound?
00:50:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll hear music, I think, that will feel like it's from all those different eras and times. So we made, I would call it kind of 80s soulful pop for it. We've made 70s influence stuff. And then we've made some that are a little bit more kind of classic Broadway.
00:50:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:50:48
Speaker 1: So how did both of these come to you? What was the.
00:50:51
Speaker 3: Both through different paths. So Imitation of Life came... It started with our original director, Liesl Tommy. And she had a general meeting with Universal's theater department. And Imitation of Life is an intellectual property that Universal owns because they made the two films. And it was all based on a book by a woman named Fanny Hurst. this book was very popular and the films were very popular. My parents' generation, they all have seen at least one of the films. They were both Oscar nominated. And so these were kind of classic films that had pretty huge cultural impact in their day. And Liesl met with Universal and was like, I always had this vision of making Imitation of Life into a musical and writing it more from a black perspective where we center the black woman in the story. There's a black woman and a white woman who collaborate on a business together. The black woman is kind of like a version of an Aunt Jemima type character who's a genius in the kitchen. And the white woman goes into business with her to sell her genius.
00:52:05
Speaker 2: In the kitchen to the world, package it up and sell it.
00:52:09
Speaker 3: And in the films and in the book, the focus is more centered on the white woman, but we decided to make it more focused on Delilah, the black woman in the story.
00:52:20
Speaker 2: And Liesl, when.
00:52:22
Speaker 3: She pitched the idea to Universal, we hadn't even met or talked about it yet, but she was like, and I really want John Legend to write the music and Lynn Nottage to write the book. And we were her first choices and she got both of us to do it. And she had worked, I think, with Lynn before, but we'd never worked together or met before. But she reached out to my team and just pitched the idea. Would John ever want to write for Broadway? Would he be interested in this particular intellectual property? And I read the book and watched one of the films. And I was like, I could see myself writing this.
00:52:56
Speaker 2: And it was during the pandemic. So we had a lot of free time. Challenge. We weren't touring.
00:53:04
Speaker 3: And, you know, I had time to, like, dig into it. And so we started meeting on zoom. Um, they're both based in New York, Liesl and Lynn, and I was based here in this room. So I would, uh, would be doing a lot of zooms from this room and then doing a lot of the writing here. And that, that was the first project I really wrote in this room. Um, cause we had just moved into this place, uh, in May of 2021. And, um, and so I started writing the songs right here in this room and, and, uh, And I was enjoying it. It was fun to write in a different genre and for a different medium. And, and it was fun collaborating with two people who had a lot of experience in the theater world. So they kind of mentored me and, and helped me apply my understanding of songwriting to a different medium. And, and then we started doing workshops and, And workshops are interesting because there's really no other, you know, experience I've had.
00:54:12
Speaker 2: With that level of iteration on a project.
00:54:15
Speaker 3: When you do workshops, it starts with a table read and you're teaching the song. So you're starting to hear how those sound in the actor's voices. And then you start to see it when the choreographer is introduced to the equation and you're seeing, you know, how the song plays out in the staging and everything. And every time you see a new manifestation of it, you're like, Oh, I got to change that.
00:54:42
Speaker 2: Oh, I got to fix that. Oh, this is not working.
00:54:44
Speaker 3: And so the iteration process is constant. You're always rewriting, uh, you're removing songs, uh, adding new songs. We rewritten the opening song as Lynn told me we would. She told me, she was like, the hardest thing is going to be getting the opening song, right? You're going to rewrite it multiple times. I promise you. And she was absolutely right.
00:55:04
Speaker 1: It probably sounds different, though, on the front end of things. Probably when you're in the process, like, wait, are you kidding me?
00:55:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:55:11
Speaker 3: And so you just keep working on it and seeing it and hearing it in all the voices of the actors and seeing them dance with it and do all the things you have to do on stage with it.
00:55:23
Speaker 2: And it keeps changing. But I feel like I've learned and grown so much during this process.
00:55:30
Speaker 3: And I feel like I've started a whole new career that I want to do more of.
00:55:34
Speaker 1: You have, because you're doing another one pretty quickly.
00:55:37
Speaker 3: And that's why when the Basquiat musical came to us, I was like, yeah, I want to do some more. And the idea of doing something with the blessing of Jean-Michel's sisters, who are in charge of his legacy now, was exciting. Obviously, he's such an iconic figure in culture and art.
00:55:59
Speaker 2: And.
00:56:01
Speaker 3: I looked at it as this amazing opportunity and challenge to try to capture his life in music. Yeah.
00:56:08
Speaker 1: He's such a, um, I mean, he's obviously so iconic and his work is so well known, but obviously you're getting into the story in a different way. Did you, was, did you learn new things about him?
00:56:17
Speaker 2: I'm learning all kinds of new things about him.
00:56:19
Speaker 3: I never studied him, uh, in depth until I, uh, until I had the opportunity to do this. And our book writer, Marcus Gardley, like, He, you know, it's his role to study his story and to craft the story of the show. And then it's my role to follow his lead, follow his story and create songs for each scene that help advance the story. You want to make it feel like it works for the time period in which the show is based. But also you want to be influenced by the music he was listening to. He made music, too, during this time. So I listened to, you know, his sisters made kind of like a soundtrack for King Pleasure.
00:57:04
Speaker 2: Which was.
00:57:06
Speaker 3: An exhibit, an exhibition that they did honoring his memory. And so I listened to the soundtrack they made for that exhibition and just tried to study up and then just tried to respond to the storytelling that Marcus was doing with songs that helped advance that story.
00:57:25
Speaker 1: Wow. Is there... maybe from imitation of life, like a song you could, you could play.
00:57:30
Speaker 2: Oh, mine.
00:57:32
Speaker 3: Um, Saturday night in Harlem is my favorite song. Um, when this happens in the show, it's in the second act and Delilah, our main character is dating a guy named Elroy and he's, you know, handsome and romantic with her. And, and, uh, and, uh, he loves being a black man in Harlem. And, um, Delilah's daughter's name is Piola and she's mixed and she's light-skinned enough that she can pass for white. And anybody who's watched the film know that that's a big part of the story is that Delilah has this daughter who could pass for white and chooses to do so during a time when that was very transgressive. But it was also done a significant amount by folks who.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: Had the ability to do so.
00:58:21
Speaker 3: But he's selling her on the idea that Being black is the thing to be, and being in Harlem, he'll take that over anything. And I'm singing this one because it's one of the few songs that's in a male voice because most of the lead characters in the show are women. And so I'm going to sing Saturday Night in Harlem, one of my favorite songs from the show.
00:58:47
Speaker 2: I've seen a lot of faces I've been a lot of places.
00:58:54
Speaker 5: But none of them are quite like mine. Let them stroll Park Avenue. Sip martinis, taste fondue. That's not my idea of a good time. Give me chitlins, collard greens Delilah's fried chicken and black-eyed peas Moonshine whiskey and a cheap bottle of.
00:59:28
Speaker 4: Wine That fine line is not for me Keep your high society We can strut down Linux And I'll be satisfied Oh, I'm.
00:59:47
Speaker 6: Uptown In my zone Round one, two, five I feel right at home I'll take a Saturday night in Harlem Anytime.
01:00:01
Speaker 2: I'll take a.
01:00:01
Speaker 6: Saturday night in Harlem Oh, man.
01:00:09
Speaker 1: Oh, I got to go see that thing. That's phenomenal, man. How fun to write from that perspective, just like doing that like Fats Waller kind of bluesy stuff. And then, you know, just what a cool, and to write from a character, the perspective of a character named Ellery in Harlem. That's just a lot you could go with that.
01:00:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love, and I love writing for women too, and writing from a woman's point of view, because It's just different and it allows me to go places in vocal range that I wouldn't be able to do for myself and perspective that I wouldn't do for myself. And so it's just interesting and cool to write for different characters in the show.
01:00:50
Speaker 1: Is it strange that because, you know, usually you sit down and come up with songs for an album and those sort of live on. As a part of you. Like, if you go on tour, they're your songs now. They're not really going to go on tour if John Legend's on tour.
01:01:05
Speaker 2: Well, my songs get covered a lot, too.
01:01:07
Speaker 1: Sure.
01:01:08
Speaker 2: And I love hearing covers.
01:01:10
Speaker 3: Like, I heard Benson Boone doing All of Me on his last tour, and it was so beautiful. And on Instagram, I'll just get people sending me their covers all the time.
01:01:21
Speaker 2: And I love that, too.
01:01:22
Speaker 1: But, yeah.
01:01:23
Speaker 3: It's different writing for your own career, for your own repertoire, writing with the intent that you're going to be the one singing it, versus writing for a character, for a show that's going to exist beyond your own solo career.
01:01:37
Speaker 1: Hopefully 100 years.
01:01:39
Speaker 2: Some shows go on forever. There's revivals. There's all that. And so these songs can live forever. And it's different.
01:01:47
Speaker 3: It's an exciting new branch of my career to have these songs out there in the world performed by these amazing actors.
01:01:55
Speaker 2: And the talent on Broadway is really special.
01:01:58
Speaker 3: Because, you know, they're not only really good at singing these songs, but they're actors, they're dancers. You know, they talk about the term triple threat, like these folks are triple threats.
01:02:08
Speaker 2: They can do all of it.
01:02:10
Speaker 3: And it's so impressive and exciting to put my songs in their voices.
01:02:14
Speaker 1: That's amazing. Um, when you're talking about Delilah's Daughter 2, it reminded me, I forgot that you did, uh, you helped produce, or you, you distributed, produced, you can tell me what you did on it, that, uh, great Kamau Bell documentary. Yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker 4: Yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker 3: A thousand percent me, uh, which was about, um, what it means to be biracial or multiracial, um, in America.
01:02:38
Speaker 2: And, uh, my kids, you know, are black and Asian.
01:02:41
Speaker 3: And, um, I think especially in 2026, it's just a modern part of reality that there are so many people who identify as biracial or multiracial. And I thought Kamau went about the storytelling in such a cool way because he talked about his own daughters and his own family and talked about, you know, a lot of other kids and families around the.
01:03:09
Speaker 2: San Francisco Bay Area where he lived.
01:03:12
Speaker 3: And I thought the story had so much heart and so much connection to the way people are living these days. And we were proud to help produce that.
01:03:21
Speaker 1: It was great, man. My kids are black and Mexican. So we showed it to them.
01:03:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:25
Speaker 1: You know. As a parent, you think it's, I mean, I think it seemed at that time to really resonate.
01:03:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:31
Speaker 1: You hope it kind of sticks with them.
01:03:32
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:33
Speaker 1: But I'm sure it will in some way. It was cool, man.
01:03:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:38
Speaker 1: You're doing a lot. So thanks for taking the time.
01:03:40
Speaker 2: I'm so happy we got to do this.
01:03:42
Speaker 1: I don't know how you have the time to do anything else but work. This is work, I guess. But thank you, man.
01:03:47
Speaker 2: I appreciate you.
01:04:05
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
Speaker 1: This is a gorgeous room.
00:00:21
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. I do a lot of songwriting in here.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I also have a studio where I record, but I've taken to writing here in this room. It first started during the pandemic, and I was writing for a musical called which is finally premiering.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: The musical that's... Imitation of Life. Right.
00:00:45
Speaker 3: So I first started writing songs in here for that. And then I wrote my children's album here.
00:00:50
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:00:51
Speaker 3: And then I've been writing another musical. And almost all that songwriting has been happening here in this room.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: Was this room set up like this prior to the pandemic?
00:01:01
Speaker 3: This room was set up... Well, we moved here during the pandemic. And this room was always going to be like a piano bar.
00:01:07
Speaker 2: So we have a bar. We have.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: Behind the cameras... my awards here and everything. And this was always set up to be this room and a vibe. It's like my version of a musical man cave, I think. You know, if you wanted some whiskey or listen to some music, you come in here. We've got, you know, a record player in the room, some nice speakers, and it's a vibe.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. It really is. Do you feel better writing outside of the studio?
00:01:39
Speaker 3: When I'm writing by myself, I like to write here because I like how convenient it is. But also, I like that anytime inspiration strikes, I can just run back in here. And I only record it on my voice memos on my phone, so it's not any kind of sophisticated recording.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: But it gets the idea on.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: Tape, and then we can figure out what to do with it later.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: And then I do the proper recording at my studio.
00:02:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. The difference between writing so much writing happens with other people.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: You know, like, I don't know if that was exactly the case around your first album, get lifted. It always has been.
00:02:21
Speaker 3: I've never made an album where I didn't co-write except my children's album. So I wrote every original song on my children's album, but every other album I've made, every, every album has had lots of co-writing, uh, I've had individual songs that I've written by myself completely, but there's no album before that didn't include co-writing until I made the Children's album.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: But is it usually all in a room together?
00:02:49
Speaker 2: Often.
00:02:50
Speaker 3: So we didn't start using Zoom until the pandemic. But now you will have Zoom writing sessions. So for my Legend album, I had some Zoom writing sessions. For this album with Pharrell Muse, I've had some Zoom writing sessions. But before that, we were in a room together and often it would be me and a producer. So the producer is usually responsible for the instrumental, the beat, as we call it in hip hop and R & B parlance.
00:03:20
Speaker 2: And then.
00:03:22
Speaker 3: Myself and maybe another writer would be responsible for the top line. And so the top line is what we call the melody, the thing that's sung by the singer. So the melody and the lyric is the top line. And so I'm often responsible for that. Sometimes we'll have another top line writer join me. But usually there's a producer making a beat or an instrumental and the top line writers write what I sing.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: And so you're sort of listening as as either two beats or as the beats coming together.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: Thinking of ideas.
00:03:54
Speaker 3: So sometimes producers will have kind of a library of beats together. that they think are appropriate for you and they'll play them for you. And then you'll say, Oh, let's work with that one. That sounds good. Uh, and doesn't mean the beat is stuck at that spot.
00:04:09
Speaker 2: It may evolve.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: We may add live instrumentation, um, and tweak it a bit, move things around. Uh, but those are at least ideas to get the thoughts started. And then we start to write the top line to it. And usually they'll play those beats. Uh, sometimes they'll make them in the room, like, uh, When I was writing with Anderson. Paak, we made the beat there in the room.
00:04:32
Speaker 2: We were just jamming. I was on the keys. He was on the drums.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: And I think a couple other instrumentalists were in the room, and we were just jamming. And we came up with what we came up with in the room. Same thing when I worked with the Free Nationals, who were.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Part of his crew.
00:04:50
Speaker 3: But other times, the producers will have the beats already ready, and you just listen to a bunch. and see what inspires you. And I'll usually record a mumble track to either my phone or I'll go in the booth or we'll have a little handheld mic and I'll just mumble a bunch of melodies over the instrumentals and see what feels right. Sometimes I'll be like, oh, that melody really works. Sometimes I'll say, I like this aspect of that melody, but I'll use this aspect of the other melody and kind of piece the song together. And once I've figured out what the form of the song will be, so the melody, the structure, and sort of a little bit of the concept, then I'll start to finish out the lyric and flesh it out, flesh out the storytelling, and complete the song.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: It's amazing too, because it feels like, just thinking about on the new album, a song like Pray For Ya, which I can't get out of my head, to be honest.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:05:54
Speaker 1: That contrasting that with say, uh, there's a song you did with, I can't remember the name now, but it was, it was a song you did with, um, Sergio Mendez, you know, and it's like both great songs, but one far more sort of complex than the other. And it sort of seems like you're able to write to something really simple, like pray for you or something a little more harmonically, maybe complex. Yeah.
00:06:19
Speaker 3: Pray for you has an interesting, um, progeny because, um, It started out.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: In a session with Usher.
00:06:30
Speaker 3: So if you listen to the background vocals, the, oh, hey, that's Usher singing those from the original version.
00:06:38
Speaker 2: Of the song.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: And it had basically the same melody that I'm singing now, but it had a different beat back then. And we changed the lyric to make it feel like it fit me and my point of view a little bit more.
00:06:53
Speaker 2: But it started....
00:06:55
Speaker 3: As kind of the bones of that song started in an Usher session. And that's why you'll still hear some of his backing vocals on it. And then the melody was kind of already established in that session. And then when we rewrote the lyric, we adhered to that melody still. So I didn't really write any of the melodies, but I wrote a lot of the lyrics in the new version of the song. And that's what you hear in the completed version is a lot of my lyrical ideas, but a lot of Pharrell's melodic ideas that he wrote.
00:07:29
Speaker 2: To a beat that he created.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: And is that you playing on that? Or is that Pharrell?
00:07:34
Speaker 3: It's me playing at the end of the song, the piano. But a lot of the track isn't piano driven. It's, you know, the 808 and the bass and some keyboards.
00:07:47
Speaker 2: And things and some strings that I didn't play.
00:07:50
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:07:51
Speaker 1: It's wild because you're such an adept sort of self-contained. You don't need anyone else on the one hand. But on the other hand, you are the sort of consummate collaborator.
00:08:02
Speaker 2: Oh, I love collaborating.
00:08:04
Speaker 3: And I think I can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to songwriting, playing piano, vocals, obviously.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: But I love collaborating. I love seeing the result of.
00:08:20
Speaker 3: two different energies and two different areas of expertise coming in a room together and seeing what we do together, it's exciting and interesting. And it gives you the chance to renew yourself, I think, in ways that you wouldn't always be able to do by yourself. I think having new energy to react to and to bounce off of.
00:08:46
Speaker 2: Helps you stay fresh.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: And you have such a style. You have your own style as a player. Pharrell also, I mean, I don't think he's quite a piano player like you are. But he has a style. He has a style, right?
00:08:59
Speaker 2: He definitely has a style.
00:09:00
Speaker 3: I mean, he's been producing massive records for like 30 years. And I think people recognize his style when they hear it. And that's what you want as a producer. You want to have an identity as a producer. And he certainly has one.
00:09:16
Speaker 1: Was it interesting to work with someone like fro who does have such a um signature almost melodic sort.
00:09:23
Speaker 3: Of uh-huh well i think it's fun because like i said i think it gives you gives me the chance to do something new even though we'd worked together a couple times before we never done anything this thorough and deep as a collaboration and uh uh doing an entire album with him allowed me to create something that felt fresh and different from the rest of my repertoire um but still enough connective tissue that it That it didn't sound like foreign to my repertoire, but it still sounded new and fresh and like a really urgent and necessary addition to my repertoire.
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. At first, was there any trepidation around, well, maybe I can't mess with this exact melody.
00:10:05
Speaker 2: That Pharrell did?
00:10:07
Speaker 3: Some people on my label were like, you got to be careful with Pharrell because it could sound so much like Pharrell that it doesn't sound like you anymore. And some people on my team were saying that, but I wasn't worried about that. I think I just went in saying, we're going to get in the room And we're going to figure it out.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: We're going to make it sound great.
00:10:32
Speaker 3: We're like two really experienced, creative people who have a track record of making really great music. And how could it not be great? We're going to make something great together. And I wasn't really worried about having too much of his influence or whatever. I just figured I have so much of a point of view that it was going to get expressed musically in the album. And I think when you listen to it, it sounds like the two of us came together instead of one or the other taking over creatively.
00:11:03
Speaker 1: And you really feel that happened without too much consternation or dialogue even.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: And we had dialogue. We had, you know, like, does this work for you? Does this work for you?
00:11:13
Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah.
00:11:14
Speaker 3: And sometimes we would disagree about, you know, should this instrument stay there or should we rewrite this lyric?
00:11:23
Speaker 2: And we figured it out. And my goal was.
00:11:25
Speaker 3: for every record is just let the music win it's not about anybody's ego it's not about um it's.
00:11:31
Speaker 2: No like pride in owning.
00:11:35
Speaker 3: The best idea i just want the best idea to win um and so um hopefully the evidence is in the record that we let the best ideas win what.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: Were some of those conversations i mean was there a common denominator between those conversations where where if you're having a conversation on a given song about maybe stripping back an instrument or adding an instrument or something, was there, at the end of the day, like a mission statement you could go back to and sort of say, well, this idea is probably best because it serves what we're trying to do?
00:12:05
Speaker 3: Well, I think from the beginning, Pharrell came to me with the concept for the album that it would sound classic with beautiful orchestration and strings and horns and sound like the classics but with 808 beats and like a hip hop foundation underneath.
00:12:26
Speaker 2: And I think the only times.
00:12:29
Speaker 3: We really had choices and disagreements were around how much.
00:12:36
Speaker 2: Of the classic side to keep versus.
00:12:39
Speaker 3: Stripping it down a little bit more. So sometimes we will have recorded a bunch of horns and we only use like 20% of what we recorded on certain songs, a bunch of orchestration, and cut it back in certain areas. So I think a lot of times that's a lot of what producing is, and a lot of what arranging is, is not only knowing what to add, but knowing what to take away. And so a lot of our conversations were, well, does this need to be here? Should we take it away and make it sound a little grittier and not as pretty, maybe? But more effective because it's grittier and in that balance between the hip-hop and the classic, maybe hip-hop needs to win a little more sometimes. And so these were some of the conversations we were having and I'm so pleased with where we landed on every track.
00:13:38
Speaker 2: I think we got the balance right on every track.
00:13:42
Speaker 1: Where were you in the balance?
00:13:44
Speaker 3: It could go either way. But Pharrell's a producer and he made the beats so Um, he made the drums and the 808s and the, uh, and a lot of the kind of, uh, the, um, the foundation for a lot of the tracks. And so sometimes he would, you know, want us to not distract from that foundation with all the pretty sounds. And, you know, eventually, you know, we compromise on some of it. We kept some of the things I wanted and took away some of the things I wanted. And then we finally landed where we needed to land.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: I'll say a song like everything feels like to me, after having listened a few times, everything started to symbolize the, what I started to imagine was the negotiation that might've happened on the album because it felt like, and maybe I'm wrong, but it's such a, it's one of the songs that sounds like it could have produced differently, probably been on any one of your projects. But then there's this like, in this Basquiat kind of fashion, like these 808s that will be.
00:14:45
Speaker 3: Like, Well, I loved that song from the beginning because it sounded different than just a straight ballad. I liked the 808s kind of dirtying it up a bit and not making it sound so pristine. I think that was what attracted me to it from the beginning. All we added on that song, and there was no really debate about it, was adding the strings. Pharrell always envisioned that song having an orchestral arrangement too. But I think what sold me on the song from the beginning was that juxtaposition between sounding like a typical John Legend ballad, but having the 808s, it felt right.
00:15:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really stark, the difference between the two approaches on that song.
00:15:38
Speaker 3: It's funny because when I played it for Terrace Martin, who was involved in arranging all the horns on the album, when I played it for him, he said, this sounds like what the thesis was going into the album of matching that classic with the 808s.
00:15:55
Speaker 2: He said, this sounds like this is what you guys were aiming for.
00:15:58
Speaker 1: Amazing. So how much of that song was done before you came to it?
00:16:05
Speaker 3: I only rewrote a little bit of the lyric and Pharrell wrote most of it. And this happened right after the fires here. So you listen to the lyric. You know, I live in Los Angeles, but he was living in Paris and still is. But he was watching the news and a lot of his friends live here in Los Angeles. And he wrote a song where the first verse is really talking.
00:16:26
Speaker 2: About the mountains being on fire.
00:16:28
Speaker 3: And losing one's home and but still having the love of your life and and knowing how important that is beyond any material things.
00:16:38
Speaker 2: And so he wrote that idea.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: And in some ways, I was hesitant to put it out at that time, because he was like, man, we should just put it out now, because it's so timely.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: And I was like, you know, it feels so raw in LA, like, because I live here.
00:16:53
Speaker 3: And everything feels so raw, that I didn't want to feel like we were exploiting the tragedy here.
00:17:01
Speaker 2: But I figured if the song.
00:17:04
Speaker 3: worked it should work at any time and and shouldn't need to come out um right after the fires happen um and i think the song still works and uh it feels timeless.
00:17:15
Speaker 1: Yeah it does because in the context of the album now that you say that of course that could eat very of course that's the genesis or you know i can see how that could be the genesis but in the context of the album it doesn't sound tied to any particular current event.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: I love that it feels timeless still, even though we were writing it in a moment that it was inspired directly by that moment. I had friends who lost their homes, visited communities where their homes were lost, visited firemen who were in the trenches. And so all that was so raw to this whole community. And what I hoped was that the song didn't need to be tied to that time and that it could feel timeless and classic.
00:17:59
Speaker 2: And I think we accomplished that.
00:18:01
Speaker 1: Definitely did. Definitely did. So take me back to the genesis of the whole thing. You mentioned it was Pharrell's idea. And I should also say that the album has been done for a while. So you've been living with it.
00:18:15
Speaker 3: So most of the album has been done. We mixed it back in the late spring. But the recording all happened basically in 2025.
00:18:24
Speaker 2: So very little of it.
00:18:26
Speaker 3: Happened in 2026. And so we've been sitting on it for a while. It feels like a secret, you know?
00:18:33
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool. I mean, it's a luxury in a way to have, you know.
00:18:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we just wanted to get everything in order. I changed management during that time. And I just wanted to make sure that the machine that would be responsible for marketing, it was a well-oiled machine and ready to execute. And I didn't want to waste this music and not have everything on the business side in order before we did it. So we waited to get everything right before we tried to release it. It started back in December 2024. Pharrell called me. He calls me very early because he lives in Paris and I live nine hours before him earlier than him so you know when it's uh noon his time it's 3 a.m here um and uh he called me probably like 4 or 5 a.m la time and i did not pick up but i i called him back when i woke up and um he said what are you working on man i i i'm so inspired by your voice and he was really reacting to what i had done on um uh birds don't sing the song we did with clips and um That song was the opening song on their comeback album. Um, and it was really meaningful to clips themselves, but also to Pharrell and, um, he was like man i'm just so inspired by your voice i want to do a whole album with you what are you doing what are you working on when are you coming to paris uh can you just come here and camp out and we make an album together and i was like you know uh i have a home i have four kids i can't really like just live in paris um I don't know.
00:20:17
Speaker 1: Wife and kids might not mind so much.
00:20:21
Speaker 3: But I said, I will be coming out there in January of 2025.
00:20:27
Speaker 1: Only a month later.
00:20:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, a month later.
00:20:29
Speaker 3: And maybe we could spend a few days working together then, and then we'll see how it goes and then decide what we're going to do from there. So it started with that. And then he sent me Daylight, so our first single. He sent me a version of that that I rewrote a little bit, but it was basically the song that it is now when he sent it to me.
00:20:52
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, wow, this is.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: Like we're off to a good start before we even started writing together. And I recorded a version of Daylight here in L.A. And then I went to Paris and we wrote a few new songs together. We wrote, I think, Next Time during that session. We did Muse together during that session and a couple other tracks that made the album.
00:21:13
Speaker 2: And then I went back home.
00:21:16
Speaker 3: Then I came back to Paris and we did some more writing. We did some sessions via Zoom.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: Me here in L.A.
00:21:22
Speaker 3: At my studio and him there in Paris. Him being in Paris means at the Louis Vuitton offices. They built a studio there in the offices. So he's the creative director for the men at Louis Vuitton. And you walk through all the design team. They're all creating sketches and all these things.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: And then you go to the end of the.
00:21:43
Speaker 3: Hall and there's this music studio where Pharrell creates.
00:21:49
Speaker 2: And does he always work?
00:21:52
Speaker 3: I think he's always going back and forth between being a musician and being a fashion designer.
00:21:57
Speaker 2: And what a creative space he's created. Beautiful view of the Seine River in front of you.
00:22:06
Speaker 3: And it's an inspiring place to make music or create anything, I think.
00:22:11
Speaker 4: Wild.
00:22:12
Speaker 1: So had this been something you guys had even previewed with each other before, talked about as a possibility?
00:22:16
Speaker 2: Well, we had worked together before.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: We wrote a song together called It's Over for my Evolver album. And we wrote another song together during that time called Aim High. I didn't use it on Evolver. I ended up using it as a bonus track on Love in the Future. And so we'd written together a little bit before, but never spent a whole lot.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Of time together.
00:22:40
Speaker 3: And we'd known each other for couple of decades, but never really like dug in and, and, and worked on a full project together.
00:22:47
Speaker 2: And, uh, so this was a new thing to do.
00:22:51
Speaker 3: Um, I had been signed to Kanye's production company for most of the beginning of my career. So anytime I was working deeply with one producer back then, it was usually with Kanye. And then, uh, I'd worked with, um, Blake Mills on darkness and light work with Sufjan Stevens on, um, my children's album. I worked with, uh, Amir and the roots for wake up. And so I'd done kind of full albums with one producer before, um, but, um, never with Pharrell. And, uh, it was exciting as an idea. It felt like we could do something fresh and, and exciting, um, together. And, and I was so into what he was doing with clips. And, uh, I just felt like, uh, this was the right time for us to do this together.
00:23:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it's what you're going, you mentioned your collaborations with Kanye, um, And when I first was listening to this record, I was like, wow, this really is like a left turn or just a different sort of.
00:23:49
Speaker 2: It sounds new, yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: But then I started listening to it more and I started thinking just about all... And I started listening back to all your other projects as well. In some ways, it's like the inverse of your very first project where that one felt like you are the sort of... artist in the mold of like a r & b singer songwriter um classic you know it's classic sort of r & b that had this that had like you know that was then produced to sound of the time you know and.
00:24:18
Speaker 3: It was like and it was a both i think both get lifted and this album have some similarities in the sense that there's like hip-hop drums and a hip-hop kind of uh foundation but uh soul songwriting and classic songwriting that's meant to be timeless. I just think Kanye's version of what hip-hop drums sound like is different.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: From Pharrell's version. Pharrell's version is a.
00:24:45
Speaker 3: Little more 808s and a little more electronic sounding, and Kanye's were more like sample drum loops and things of that nature back then. So I think there's some similarities, but also Pharrell has such a sonic signature that you can hear that And that's what makes it different from any other producers.
00:25:07
Speaker 2: Totally.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: And because of that, the difference between them, it sounds much more like these were songs, like current modern songs where you're adding classic elements and Get Lifted felt almost like the inverse of that, the opposite of that, which was like, these are these classic songs and let's add some hip hop, you know, and how much hip hop can we add.
00:25:25
Speaker 2: Or, you know. Yeah.
00:25:27
Speaker 3: And either way, I think it's cool to work with these kinds of producers that have that lean a different way than I would lean personally because it pushes me and it adds flavor to what I would do in a way that.
00:25:45
Speaker 2: I think makes the record better.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So you said this record started with Daylight. Mm-hmm. Do you remember how it came to you?
00:25:53
Speaker 3: He sent me a demo of it. He sent me a demo and it was in Sam Henshaw's voice. Sam Henshaw is a singer and songwriter from the U.K., um, Afro British guy. And, uh, he, um, sang a beautiful version of it. So it already set the bar high. I'm like, let me not fuck this up. Um, and I changed a couple of lines, uh, particularly in the hook, um, and a couple of lines in the verse.
00:26:21
Speaker 2: And, uh, and then I sang it and, uh, it.
00:26:24
Speaker 3: Felt really good. It felt, um, like it was already like a single. I was like, man, this could be out right now. And I'd be excited that this was the first song of this project. And it ended up being the first song for the project. But, you know, like 18 months later. Did they send a chart over or did you just sit down with it? Oh, no one sends charts. I'm not not in our genre. I don't know if other genres send charts, but we don't send charts. Everything's really basically by ear and and you hear it and they'll send like a lyric sheet over.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: But that's it.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that a lot of the songs are less piano forward than your other ones. Is that one that you'll be able to tour and do it in the same manner?
00:27:12
Speaker 2: Oh, sure.
00:27:12
Speaker 3: I mean, I'll tour with the full band for this album, so we'll be able to represent the full arrangements on the tracks.
00:27:19
Speaker 1: Will you be playing with them, though? Did you have to learn them? Oh, yeah.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: I mean, that's part of the arrangement on the song.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: So that'll be in the performance of the song and it's on the record too.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: And, you know, it'll be a full arrangement on tour.
00:27:47
Speaker 3: And I play piano on just about every track, at least a little bit of piano on every track.
00:27:52
Speaker 1: Get Back to Bodies on the Floor is a great stretch of the album. It's like really strong.
00:27:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, it gets very, I think we wanted the whole album to feel cinematic and particularly that part of the album. When Pharrell pitched the idea of the album to me, he was like, I want to make some Black James Bond shit. And I feel like Get Back is like the quintessential Black James Bond record. And then a lot of the storytelling in the heart of the album that starts with Get Back is that kind of intrigue and the ups and downs of a relationship And it feels like the stakes are high and there's a lot of urgency and bodies on the floor kind of culminates that with this war, uh, metaphor, um, uh, for a relationship. Uh, and really I was watching, uh, mob land this, the paramount plus show when I wrote the lyric for bodies on the floor. And I was just envisioning like this cycle of retribution and violence and, and, um, nobody really winning because, uh, everybody gets harmed when it comes down to that. And, uh, and then applying that to this relationship that we're exploring in the whole.
00:29:13
Speaker 2: Album, which is a, is it a toxic relationship?
00:29:17
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:29:18
Speaker 3: You know, like, uh, get back is like her cheating on another guy to be with you and then going back to him. And then, uh, Under the Bridge is about two people betraying each other and kind of one-upping each other with revenge and asking for forgiveness. And then Next Time is kind of exploring the possibility that in another life you could get back together. and then bodies on the floor is like fuck it we probably shouldn't we probably shouldn't do this I'm tired of fighting but then at the end of it it's.
00:30:00
Speaker 2: Like all is fair in love and war what am.
00:30:03
Speaker 3: I still jealous for I let you leave but I can't let you go Is there someone else?
00:30:09
Speaker 2: No, I don't want to know.
00:30:11
Speaker 3: Can't see those hands on your body. Is it the me or nobody? But is the good worth the bad? Do I miss what we had so much that I need.
00:30:18
Speaker 2: It right back? Late night call. Do you miss me at all?
00:30:24
Speaker 4: It's like.
00:30:26
Speaker 2: You know, it's intriguing.
00:30:27
Speaker 1: You might have to star in your musical. I was going to say that. I don't know how far along you are into that thing, but you might need to be on top of that.
00:30:36
Speaker 3: But yeah, I love the storytelling in it because it feels like the stakes are high and there's a lot of like urgency and.
00:30:44
Speaker 2: I feel like it leaves the audience wondering what happens next.
00:30:46
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:47
Speaker 1: And it's such a classic, like, I mean, you brought up Usher before, like confessions as like a concept. I mean, it's like, you know, it holds up to this day. You listen to that and you're just like, Oh my God.
00:30:54
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: I think people got wrapped up in the story.
00:30:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. Although I guess, thankfully for you on, on, on this one, it's, it's, uh, you were able to write maybe more just from, uh, uh, I don't know if it was probably not about someone else, but you were able to write from a detached.
00:31:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:31:08
Speaker 3: I feel like, Us doing it together and both of us having a lot to do with the songwriting allowed us to kind of.
00:31:16
Speaker 2: Have a little bit of creative distance from it in a way.
00:31:18
Speaker 3: Like, I feel like we were kind of writing a movie together and writing the soundtrack to the movie together. And both of us are in, I'm not going to speak for Pharrell, but what I assume are stable relationships.
00:31:31
Speaker 2: We have four kids.
00:31:32
Speaker 3: Each of us have four kids and, you know, we're family, man. And my relationship with Chrissy has nowhere near the level of ups and downs that this couple in our album has. But we wanted to be creative and cinematic. And I felt like the storytelling needed to feel cinematic, too.
00:31:53
Speaker 1: Was that something you had to preview for your wife?
00:31:55
Speaker 2: I told her, don't take this personally.
00:32:00
Speaker 1: Listen, we wrote some songs. They're not about.
00:32:02
Speaker 2: I was like, she'll know.
00:32:03
Speaker 3: She knows it's not about us because it doesn't sound like anything we're going through.
00:32:08
Speaker 2: And so she knows that.
00:32:09
Speaker 3: But it's interesting because obviously I've written songs about us and our relationship. Very famously, all of me, I wrote when we got engaged and we're about to get married.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: And she has been my muse for a lot of my career.
00:32:23
Speaker 3: Um, but naming an album Muse and then it not being about her is interesting.
00:32:28
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
00:32:30
Speaker 3: It's a choice, um, that, you know, I had to explain, but, uh, okay, well, when did Muse, when did Muse enter the equation as like a, cause that.
00:32:40
Speaker 1: Sort of becomes the, the, the, the spine, I guess.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: And we, we, we recorded the song before we knew that that was the album title.
00:32:49
Speaker 2: Um, we had some other ideas for the album.
00:32:50
Speaker 3: Title, but, uh, Muse is what we settled on because it did feel like we were following this story of the artist and his muse throughout. And then we looked up, you know, the history of the term muse. And, you know, in Greek mythology, these nine goddesses who inspired everything, art, culture, science, each of them were kind of responsible for a different discipline in Greek mythology. And we just thought about, you know, making this album in Paris with, you know, with fashion design happening down the hall and looking out on, you know, the beauty of this city with all this art and architecture and all these amazing things. Muse just felt like it captured the spirit and the energy of the album really well.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: And we opened the album with that track Muse.
00:33:42
Speaker 3: And then we follow the artist and his muse throughout the album. And I felt like that was the way to capture what this album meant and the energy of the album.
00:33:53
Speaker 1: You then sequenced the tracks around that sort of.
00:33:57
Speaker 2: We.
00:33:57
Speaker 3: Sequenced the tracks before we decided the album was called Muse. But it just all made sense. The sequencing made sense with the storyline. And then the album title made sense as well.
00:34:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. You were talking about being in Paris and Pharrell's studio in... The Louis Vuitton office and this design happening. I mean, you hear about Pharrell being the creative director of Louis Vuitton. But how is it actually like seeing that? I mean, even for you, I imagine who, you know, you've been a creative person most of your adult life. But that has to be a pretty unique space to create in.
00:34:35
Speaker 2: Well, it's very cool. And, you know, it's not.
00:34:38
Speaker 3: You know, it's not that foreign because, you know, Kanye was always doing fashion when we were working together. Virgil Abloh was in our orbit a lot. He designed my album cover for Love in the Future. And so we'd always had.
00:34:55
Speaker 2: The fashion world around us while we were making music over the years. But, you know, this is.
00:35:01
Speaker 3: Pretty much the pinnacle of, you know, that collaboration, you know, having someone working for one of the most important fashion houses in the world. And making an album literally at the same time in the same place is pretty special.
00:35:17
Speaker 2: And so even.
00:35:18
Speaker 3: Though I'd touched those worlds before, this was the deepest immersion into that world.
00:35:24
Speaker 1: It's like the height of both worlds.
00:35:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker 3: And then top it off with the first time anyone heard a song from the album, it was at the fashion show for, for Louis Vuitton in January of 2026. Right, to pray for you there. I'm at the show. All these celebrities are there. All these fashion writers are there. And I hear the orchestra warming up. And I hear chords that I recognize. And I knew he was going to play the song, but I didn't know what order he was going to play it in. And the first song played in the show was Pray For You. And so that's like, this is.
00:36:01
Speaker 3: All the reason you would do an album with Pharrell Williams, creative director of Louis Vuitton Men. You're like, this is why you want to do this, because you're making amazing music, and then you get a chance to debut it.
00:36:12
Speaker 2: In a way that no one else could.
00:36:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:36:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:36:15
Speaker 1: I mean, the album cover, I imagine, had to be somewhat... The album cover is beautiful. It had to be.
00:36:21
Speaker 2: A lot of this was Pharrell's vision. He said he had this vision.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Of me and a brigade of black men playing... orchestral instruments behind me with me on an upright piano. Like he told me that early in the project. And when we shot the video for Fireflies, that's what we assembled was this brigade of black men playing strings and horns and then an 808 machine. And then we made that the album cover as well. And it just represents the vision that we had for the project from the beginning.
00:37:03
Speaker 1: Wow. Is there something from the album that you could play a little bit of?
00:37:08
Speaker 2: Sure. What do you want to hear?
00:37:09
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
00:37:10
Speaker 3: We just made the video for Bodies on the Floor.
00:37:14
Speaker 1: You did?
00:37:15
Speaker 5: Heard the sound of the sirens Penetrating the silence Are we doing this again?
00:37:25
Speaker 2: Tell me this is not how it ends.
00:37:28
Speaker 5: Broken glass on the counter, not another encounter.
00:37:35
Speaker 2: We go round for round, pound for pound, over and over and over.
00:37:45
Speaker 4: After all we've lost, it only costs some things we just.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: Can't afford to say.
00:37:59
Speaker 6: I can't keep repeating, so I'm retreating.
00:38:06
Speaker 2: I can't find a reason.
00:38:08
Speaker 6: For me to stay. All this blood on the table and bodies on the floor. It's a war, it's a war that I don't want to fight no more. Only heaven can save us. Stretch my hands to the Lord. The choice is yours as a war that we don't have to fight no more. They say all is fair in love and war. But what am I still jealous for? I let you leave, I can't let you go. There's someone else I don't want to know. Can't see those hands on your body. It's either me or nobody But is the good worth the bad?
00:39:01
Speaker 2: Do I miss what we had?
00:39:03
Speaker 6: So much that I need it right back.
00:39:07
Speaker 2: After all this.
00:39:09
Speaker 6: Time Can't get you off my mind Maybe I drank too much and I Just need you tonight Late night call Do you miss me at all? We'll get back together, no regrets Until the morning light When there's blood on the table.
00:39:37
Speaker 2: And bodies on the floor.
00:39:41
Speaker 1: It's a war, it's.
00:39:42
Speaker 6: A war That I don't want to fight no more Girl, only heaven can save us Stretch my hands to the Lord The choice is yours, it's a war we don't have to fight no more sir we don't have to fight no more we don't have to fight no more.
00:40:09
Speaker 2: Choice is yours as a war and.
00:40:11
Speaker 5: We don't have to fight no more oh man oh.
00:40:21
Speaker 1: You know in your head, like theoretically, John Legend's talented. You know, John Legend's talented. You see him, you're like, oh, like, this motherfucker's talented.
00:40:30
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:40:31
Speaker 1: Like, dang, man. Do you have to work on your voice?
00:40:35
Speaker 3: I work on it all the time. I warm up. I didn't warm up today, but if I have a show, you know, I'm very conscientious of the physical toll that touring takes on my voice, so I'm very careful i don't drink on tour um lots of water and tea and and uh warming up cooling down um you have to treat yourself like an athlete like a high high performance athlete um focus on your voice but um you're relying on your body to perform every night uh or four or five nights a week and so you have to do the things to take care of it make sure you You don't.
00:41:23
Speaker 2: Jeopardize your moneymaker.
00:41:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, framing it like an athlete is probably the right way because, I mean, your voice in person.
00:41:30
Speaker 3: Honestly, I think of myself as an athlete all the time. And when I'm a big sports fan, I'm not a good athlete.
00:41:38
Speaker 1: Good singer.
00:41:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, but when my favorite players get injured, I'm immediately empathizing and thinking about my voice and how I would feel.
00:41:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. with the same parallel injury in my field, I'm already, my.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: Brain goes exactly to that place and it's almost like I feel their pain when it's their hamstring or their knee or whatever it is, I connect it to the way I feel when my voice isn't operating the way it should.
00:42:12
Speaker 1: Do you think, because you have both, you have the ability to play as well as you sing, Basically, there's probably about equal. Do they feel connected? Could you do one without the other as well in your mind? Or do you see yourself as both?
00:42:27
Speaker 3: I think of myself more as a singer-songwriter than a pianist. I think piano is a little bit below singer-songwriter for me. And there are times when I'm on tour where I let my band play and I just sing. And I enjoy those times. And there are times when every song doesn't need a piano part. And so I think of myself a little bit more as a singer songwriter.
00:42:51
Speaker 2: Than a pianist.
00:42:52
Speaker 3: And I'm also around a lot of people who can really play the piano, like with a higher level of virtuosity than I can. But I do feel good about my piano playing. I think I have a really good feel and my style works really well for the songs that I write.
00:43:07
Speaker 2: But I know so many better pianists than I am.
00:43:10
Speaker 1: I don't know if Elton John would sit here and say that.
00:43:16
Speaker 3: I feel like my percentile as a singer-songwriter is higher than my percentile as a pianist.
00:43:23
Speaker 2: I got you.
00:43:23
Speaker 1: I got you. I got you. Do you work out the piano still?
00:43:27
Speaker 3: I play all the time just because I'm writing in this room a lot and playing in that sense.
00:43:33
Speaker 2: But I don't do a lot of, I guess... exercises to practice.
00:43:38
Speaker 3: But I'm always playing because I'm always using it as a tool to write.
00:43:44
Speaker 1: Has it ever happened where you hear something that intrigues you, a song, where there's a piano line that intrigues you and you think, I want to try to... And it's caused you to stretch a bit?
00:43:54
Speaker 3: I mean, anything Nina Simone does, I love the way she plays. And I am not able to do it like she does. She was a really classically trained pianist. I had a little bit of classical training, but she spent a lot more time doing it to the point where she was auditioning to get into Curtis and other music conservatories. And she was going as a pianist. She wasn't trying to be a vocalist at the time. And she was really focused on being a pianist. Whereas with me, I think piano was never my first priority and I was never training to be at that level of playing piano. I just wanted to be comfortable accompanying myself as a singer-songwriter.
00:44:40
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard you approximate Nina's playing, though.
00:44:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've tried, but I know that I can't do exactly what she did. I'm sure if I spend a lot of time working on it, but I just have never prioritized that aspect of my skill as a performer enough to get as good as she got at it.
00:44:57
Speaker 1: Do you, so some of the guys you're around that you say are, you know, guys and gals, you say you've been around that maybe.
00:45:02
Speaker 3: Like my musical director, Eugene Man Man Roberts, he's like virtuosic pianist and can play anything, can solo, he can play jazz, soul, hip hop, reggae, whatever. He's incredible. And, you know, he can do a lot on the keys that I can't do.
00:45:20
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:45:20
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:45:21
Speaker 1: What about a guy like Stevie Wonder, who might also be in the vein? I mean, maybe more on the verge of... More singer-songwriter than necessarily. But you've played... Actually, I've seen you play with Stevie. How is Stevie as a player?
00:45:34
Speaker 3: What I love about Stevie as a player was he was really introducing a lot of chord structures and progressions that were signature to his style to soul music. And so he was so innovative, I think, as a keyboard player, and he was not just playing piano.
00:45:52
Speaker 2: Often he was playing electric, kind of.
00:45:54
Speaker 3: Early electric keyboards like the Rhodes and the Wurlitzer and those synthesizers in their early iterations. So he was doing a lot of innovation, and the chords he was composing were so interesting and different for soul music to the point where when you hear them, you're like, oh, those are Stevie chords. I heard Robert Glasper talking about it, and he was talking about how Stevie has a specific singing style that is so signature to him. He has a specific songwriting style, specific way of playing that's so specific to him. And that's why he's such a genius and so impactful as an artist because he innovated and created a signature in multiple areas of making music that all of us are still looking at as the quintessential soul music that that can be made by a male R & B or whatever singer. He is the blueprint.
00:46:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
00:46:55
Speaker 1: And you know what? To add to what Robert said too, it's like you listen to Stevie, he also has a very unique to him sense of rhythm too.
00:47:04
Speaker 2: And by the way, Robert mentioned he played the drums on a lot of those tracks too.
00:47:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his drum playing is phenomenal, but it doesn't sound like any other drummer. Yeah, it's like he was so.
00:47:13
Speaker 3: himself and so influential because a lot of people came after him that tried to sound like him, but nobody sounded like him before him.
00:47:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:47:20
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that too, listening to this record, because Pharrell is similar in that way. Pharrell has a really unique sense of rhythm. It's unique to him.
00:47:28
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:47:29
Speaker 3: And similar to Stevie in the sense that when you hear a Pharrell record, you know it's him. And if you hear someone that sounds like him, you know they're trying to sound like him.
00:47:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:47:40
Speaker 3: And... I think it's great for a producer to have that kind of identity as a creator that they.
00:47:49
Speaker 2: Have a signature. It doesn't mean everything sounds the same.
00:47:51
Speaker 3: It just means that they have a real identity and a point of view as a producer.
00:47:57
Speaker 1: In your view, do you feel like you have a signature or something that.
00:47:59
Speaker 3: I think people, when they hear my compositions, they hear my voice in those compositions.
00:48:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: Like when I'm writing for Broadway, other people are singing my songs and But my friend.
00:48:11
Speaker 2: Who has collaborated with me over the years.
00:48:14
Speaker 3: And produced some of my records, he went to one of our workshops presentations. He was like, oh, I hear your songwriting voice all over this project. I hear the John Legend-isms throughout. And I think that's because I do have a signature style as a singer and a songwriter. And you can hear those characteristics even when someone else is singing it.
00:48:36
Speaker 1: And even when you're writing, because writing for Broadway is probably very different i imagine but i.
00:48:40
Speaker 3: But i didn't want it to sound like i was trying to write for broadway like i wanted it just to sound like great music um and uh and write from my own point of view as a musician and so you'll hear connective tissue between the the songs i've written for pop music and and what i wrote for theater and uh You'll hear that. You'll hear a lot of my signature as a, as a, as a songwriter, uh, as a, you know, as a stylist.
00:49:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. Tell me about writing a musical. I mean, I knew of one, Imitation of Life, which is, like you mentioned, you wrote early on in the pandemic and it's, it's, it's coming soon.
00:49:20
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's about to hit the theater on November 21st, at The Shed. It'll be off-Broadway and then hopefully eventually on-Broadway. And then we're writing another show called Boom For Real, which is about the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his legacy. A major character is also his father who took over his legacy when he passed away. And his father's efforts to reconcile with taking over his legacy but not really being heavily involved in.
00:49:56
Speaker 2: His career when he was alive. It's an interesting show.
00:50:01
Speaker 3: I'm writing it with Marcus Gardley and I'm really excited for that too. The music is different because Imitation of Life is based in the 20s and 30s and then the music for this is based in the time when Jean-Michel was alive so the 60s, 70s and 80s.
00:50:19
Speaker 1: Wow. And so do you cover that sort of territory in terms of the sound?
00:50:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'll hear music, I think, that will feel like it's from all those different eras and times. So we made, I would call it kind of 80s soulful pop for it. We've made 70s influence stuff. And then we've made some that are a little bit more kind of classic Broadway.
00:50:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:50:48
Speaker 1: So how did both of these come to you? What was the.
00:50:51
Speaker 3: Both through different paths. So Imitation of Life came... It started with our original director, Liesl Tommy. And she had a general meeting with Universal's theater department. And Imitation of Life is an intellectual property that Universal owns because they made the two films. And it was all based on a book by a woman named Fanny Hurst. this book was very popular and the films were very popular. My parents' generation, they all have seen at least one of the films. They were both Oscar nominated. And so these were kind of classic films that had pretty huge cultural impact in their day. And Liesl met with Universal and was like, I always had this vision of making Imitation of Life into a musical and writing it more from a black perspective where we center the black woman in the story. There's a black woman and a white woman who collaborate on a business together. The black woman is kind of like a version of an Aunt Jemima type character who's a genius in the kitchen. And the white woman goes into business with her to sell her genius.
00:52:05
Speaker 2: In the kitchen to the world, package it up and sell it.
00:52:09
Speaker 3: And in the films and in the book, the focus is more centered on the white woman, but we decided to make it more focused on Delilah, the black woman in the story.
00:52:20
Speaker 2: And Liesl, when.
00:52:22
Speaker 3: She pitched the idea to Universal, we hadn't even met or talked about it yet, but she was like, and I really want John Legend to write the music and Lynn Nottage to write the book. And we were her first choices and she got both of us to do it. And she had worked, I think, with Lynn before, but we'd never worked together or met before. But she reached out to my team and just pitched the idea. Would John ever want to write for Broadway? Would he be interested in this particular intellectual property? And I read the book and watched one of the films. And I was like, I could see myself writing this.
00:52:56
Speaker 2: And it was during the pandemic. So we had a lot of free time. Challenge. We weren't touring.
00:53:04
Speaker 3: And, you know, I had time to, like, dig into it. And so we started meeting on zoom. Um, they're both based in New York, Liesl and Lynn, and I was based here in this room. So I would, uh, would be doing a lot of zooms from this room and then doing a lot of the writing here. And that, that was the first project I really wrote in this room. Um, cause we had just moved into this place, uh, in May of 2021. And, um, and so I started writing the songs right here in this room and, and, uh, And I was enjoying it. It was fun to write in a different genre and for a different medium. And, and it was fun collaborating with two people who had a lot of experience in the theater world. So they kind of mentored me and, and helped me apply my understanding of songwriting to a different medium. And, and then we started doing workshops and, And workshops are interesting because there's really no other, you know, experience I've had.
00:54:12
Speaker 2: With that level of iteration on a project.
00:54:15
Speaker 3: When you do workshops, it starts with a table read and you're teaching the song. So you're starting to hear how those sound in the actor's voices. And then you start to see it when the choreographer is introduced to the equation and you're seeing, you know, how the song plays out in the staging and everything. And every time you see a new manifestation of it, you're like, Oh, I got to change that.
00:54:42
Speaker 2: Oh, I got to fix that. Oh, this is not working.
00:54:44
Speaker 3: And so the iteration process is constant. You're always rewriting, uh, you're removing songs, uh, adding new songs. We rewritten the opening song as Lynn told me we would. She told me, she was like, the hardest thing is going to be getting the opening song, right? You're going to rewrite it multiple times. I promise you. And she was absolutely right.
00:55:04
Speaker 1: It probably sounds different, though, on the front end of things. Probably when you're in the process, like, wait, are you kidding me?
00:55:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:55:11
Speaker 3: And so you just keep working on it and seeing it and hearing it in all the voices of the actors and seeing them dance with it and do all the things you have to do on stage with it.
00:55:23
Speaker 2: And it keeps changing. But I feel like I've learned and grown so much during this process.
00:55:30
Speaker 3: And I feel like I've started a whole new career that I want to do more of.
00:55:34
Speaker 1: You have, because you're doing another one pretty quickly.
00:55:37
Speaker 3: And that's why when the Basquiat musical came to us, I was like, yeah, I want to do some more. And the idea of doing something with the blessing of Jean-Michel's sisters, who are in charge of his legacy now, was exciting. Obviously, he's such an iconic figure in culture and art.
00:55:59
Speaker 2: And.
00:56:01
Speaker 3: I looked at it as this amazing opportunity and challenge to try to capture his life in music. Yeah.
00:56:08
Speaker 1: He's such a, um, I mean, he's obviously so iconic and his work is so well known, but obviously you're getting into the story in a different way. Did you, was, did you learn new things about him?
00:56:17
Speaker 2: I'm learning all kinds of new things about him.
00:56:19
Speaker 3: I never studied him, uh, in depth until I, uh, until I had the opportunity to do this. And our book writer, Marcus Gardley, like, He, you know, it's his role to study his story and to craft the story of the show. And then it's my role to follow his lead, follow his story and create songs for each scene that help advance the story. You want to make it feel like it works for the time period in which the show is based. But also you want to be influenced by the music he was listening to. He made music, too, during this time. So I listened to, you know, his sisters made kind of like a soundtrack for King Pleasure.
00:57:04
Speaker 2: Which was.
00:57:06
Speaker 3: An exhibit, an exhibition that they did honoring his memory. And so I listened to the soundtrack they made for that exhibition and just tried to study up and then just tried to respond to the storytelling that Marcus was doing with songs that helped advance that story.
00:57:25
Speaker 1: Wow. Is there... maybe from imitation of life, like a song you could, you could play.
00:57:30
Speaker 2: Oh, mine.
00:57:32
Speaker 3: Um, Saturday night in Harlem is my favorite song. Um, when this happens in the show, it's in the second act and Delilah, our main character is dating a guy named Elroy and he's, you know, handsome and romantic with her. And, and, uh, and, uh, he loves being a black man in Harlem. And, um, Delilah's daughter's name is Piola and she's mixed and she's light-skinned enough that she can pass for white. And anybody who's watched the film know that that's a big part of the story is that Delilah has this daughter who could pass for white and chooses to do so during a time when that was very transgressive. But it was also done a significant amount by folks who.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: Had the ability to do so.
00:58:21
Speaker 3: But he's selling her on the idea that Being black is the thing to be, and being in Harlem, he'll take that over anything. And I'm singing this one because it's one of the few songs that's in a male voice because most of the lead characters in the show are women. And so I'm going to sing Saturday Night in Harlem, one of my favorite songs from the show.
00:58:47
Speaker 2: I've seen a lot of faces I've been a lot of places.
00:58:54
Speaker 5: But none of them are quite like mine. Let them stroll Park Avenue. Sip martinis, taste fondue. That's not my idea of a good time. Give me chitlins, collard greens Delilah's fried chicken and black-eyed peas Moonshine whiskey and a cheap bottle of.
00:59:28
Speaker 4: Wine That fine line is not for me Keep your high society We can strut down Linux And I'll be satisfied Oh, I'm.
00:59:47
Speaker 6: Uptown In my zone Round one, two, five I feel right at home I'll take a Saturday night in Harlem Anytime.
01:00:01
Speaker 2: I'll take a.
01:00:01
Speaker 6: Saturday night in Harlem Oh, man.
01:00:09
Speaker 1: Oh, I got to go see that thing. That's phenomenal, man. How fun to write from that perspective, just like doing that like Fats Waller kind of bluesy stuff. And then, you know, just what a cool, and to write from a character, the perspective of a character named Ellery in Harlem. That's just a lot you could go with that.
01:00:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love, and I love writing for women too, and writing from a woman's point of view, because It's just different and it allows me to go places in vocal range that I wouldn't be able to do for myself and perspective that I wouldn't do for myself. And so it's just interesting and cool to write for different characters in the show.
01:00:50
Speaker 1: Is it strange that because, you know, usually you sit down and come up with songs for an album and those sort of live on. As a part of you. Like, if you go on tour, they're your songs now. They're not really going to go on tour if John Legend's on tour.
01:01:05
Speaker 2: Well, my songs get covered a lot, too.
01:01:07
Speaker 1: Sure.
01:01:08
Speaker 2: And I love hearing covers.
01:01:10
Speaker 3: Like, I heard Benson Boone doing All of Me on his last tour, and it was so beautiful. And on Instagram, I'll just get people sending me their covers all the time.
01:01:21
Speaker 2: And I love that, too.
01:01:22
Speaker 1: But, yeah.
01:01:23
Speaker 3: It's different writing for your own career, for your own repertoire, writing with the intent that you're going to be the one singing it, versus writing for a character, for a show that's going to exist beyond your own solo career.
01:01:37
Speaker 1: Hopefully 100 years.
01:01:39
Speaker 2: Some shows go on forever. There's revivals. There's all that. And so these songs can live forever. And it's different.
01:01:47
Speaker 3: It's an exciting new branch of my career to have these songs out there in the world performed by these amazing actors.
01:01:55
Speaker 2: And the talent on Broadway is really special.
01:01:58
Speaker 3: Because, you know, they're not only really good at singing these songs, but they're actors, they're dancers. You know, they talk about the term triple threat, like these folks are triple threats.
01:02:08
Speaker 2: They can do all of it.
01:02:10
Speaker 3: And it's so impressive and exciting to put my songs in their voices.
01:02:14
Speaker 1: That's amazing. Um, when you're talking about Delilah's Daughter 2, it reminded me, I forgot that you did, uh, you helped produce, or you, you distributed, produced, you can tell me what you did on it, that, uh, great Kamau Bell documentary. Yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker 4: Yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker 3: A thousand percent me, uh, which was about, um, what it means to be biracial or multiracial, um, in America.
01:02:38
Speaker 2: And, uh, my kids, you know, are black and Asian.
01:02:41
Speaker 3: And, um, I think especially in 2026, it's just a modern part of reality that there are so many people who identify as biracial or multiracial. And I thought Kamau went about the storytelling in such a cool way because he talked about his own daughters and his own family and talked about, you know, a lot of other kids and families around the.
01:03:09
Speaker 2: San Francisco Bay Area where he lived.
01:03:12
Speaker 3: And I thought the story had so much heart and so much connection to the way people are living these days. And we were proud to help produce that.
01:03:21
Speaker 1: It was great, man. My kids are black and Mexican. So we showed it to them.
01:03:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:25
Speaker 1: You know. As a parent, you think it's, I mean, I think it seemed at that time to really resonate.
01:03:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:31
Speaker 1: You hope it kind of sticks with them.
01:03:32
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:33
Speaker 1: But I'm sure it will in some way. It was cool, man.
01:03:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:38
Speaker 1: You're doing a lot. So thanks for taking the time.
01:03:40
Speaker 2: I'm so happy we got to do this.
01:03:42
Speaker 1: I don't know how you have the time to do anything else but work. This is work, I guess. But thank you, man.
01:03:47
Speaker 2: I appreciate you.
01:04:05
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
