Page 99 - Sharp Winter 2023

achievement mostly by accident, only realizing the significance of the hardware he was accruing as he barrelled toward his Emmy for producing Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert in 2018. The exclusivity of the club, a sort of Mensa group for multi-disciplinary artists, is not lost on him: “Jennifer Hudson was 17,” he notes, when I point out just how few winners there are. Nor is he unaware of the significance of being only the second Black artist to make the list after Whoopi Goldberg. Mostly, though, he sees it as freeing him up from the psychic energy of pining for awards. “Now that I’ve gotten this kind of status,” he says, “I truly don’t need to win anything else. I’m fine. I truly just want to make music that’s impactful.”
Though he’s good on the awards front, Legend isn’t through with the work that got him there. Since April, he’s been revisiting his career in his “Love In Las Vegas” residency at the Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood, synthesizing his musical past and present. The purity of a residency appeals to Legend, who says that keeping the show in one place means putting the money into the production, the stuff audiences see, rather than in transportation costs. It’s also an opportunity for him to get meta, thinking about what makes a John Legend show. “It gives me the chance to explore my entire catalogue and my roots and talk about the journey that’s brought me to where I am.” Describing the show’s four-part structure, his curatorial instincts kick back in as he patiently walks me through its trajectory from his gospel days in Ohio, to his formative time in Philadelphia and New York, to an impressionistic piano bar section, and finally to a baroque scene rooted in the feathers, glitz, and glamour of Vegas. The subtext of that journey is that Legend remembers where he comes from — and is comfortable with where he is now.
The idea of the Las Vegas residency has shifted in recent years from an institution where aging musicians lay down the last tracks of their careers to a place where mid-career stars such as Legend can explore their roots with plenty of distance left to run. Vegas itself has modernized, Legend points out: its investment in emerging chefs and hoteliers has transformed it from a glorified retirement home
into something much more dynamic. Legend is proud to represent a more diverse vanguard gracing Vegas and bringing new audiences along with them, joining the ranks of Cardi B and Drake, younger artists who have brought hip hop to a strip that has been more associated with rock and power pop.
“I think now people are doing it more in the peak of their careers,” he says. “You still have to have enough repertoire to justify getting a residency. But artists like myself and Silk Sonic and Usher, we’re still in our primes as artists, and we are celebrating the journey we’ve been on to this point, while we’ve still got a lot of new music left in us as well. I’m happy to be part of that group of artists who are, I think, modernizing Vegas, diversifying Vegas.”
As for how he feels about being at the self-described peak of his career, Legend remains even keeled. Although he routinely revisits his musical origins in his residency, he is unsentimental about the past, seeing it as continuous with the present. “I think what the streaming era has done is really flatten time,” he says with some awe, “made all times connected to each other, so that anything that came out in 2004 is just as accessible as anything that’s come out now. It makes it so everything’s connected and everything’s accessible and everything’s available. Because of that, there’s more exploration and availability of people’s catalogues now.”
Some artists might balk at that sense of availability, concerned by how easy it is for listeners to drift across different phases of an artist’s musical history, much as they’d quibble with being associated with ballads when their body of work encompasses so much more. For Legend, though, the fact that the Internet has allowed people to instantly connect with his music — all of it — is part of what makes having a repertoire and still being around to revisit, contextualize, and develop it so exciting.
“There are just so many ways for people to feel connected to the past and to have access to this music that was made decades ago all right there at your fingertips. They don’t have to go to some obscure record store to find it. It’s all there.”
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