“People were like, ‘John, why don’t you do more of these?’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, why don’t I?’” Legend says he thinks of himself as a songwriter “at least as much” as he thinks of himself as a performer, so he started writing tunes of his own based on “all the things we’re always talking about with the kids”: love, family, animals, nature. (The new album, he points out, is the first he’s made without a single co-writer.)
Once he got going, Legend sought out Stevens, whose music he’d discovered when he was on a judging panel that awarded an industry prize to Stevens’ sprawling 2005 “ Illinois “ LP. In a sense the men’s careers have mirrored each other over the subsequent years: In 2006, Stevens released a beloved Christmas album, and he was nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for original song with the ghostly “Mystery of Love,” from Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name”; this past spring, a musical based on “Illinois” even opened on Broadway.
“To me, Sufjan’s music is relaxing and stimulating at the same time,” says Legend, whose real last name, as it happens, is Stephens. “And I wanted this to feel dreamy and whimsical and adventurous and fun.”
Legend sent voice-and-piano demos he cut at home to Stevens, who lives and works in New York’s Catskill Mountains; Stevens says Legend gave him “total creative freedom” to devise arrangements for the songs, which led the producer to thoughts of “Sesame Street” and the Muppets but also of Stevie Wonder, Henry Mancini, the Beatles and Serge Gainsbourg.