YouSaid · the spoken record

John Legend

lines on the record
66
first
2022-08-04
most recent
2022-08-04
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yes, of course. So one of my roommates from college and from New York was a guy named Devon Harris. And Devon was Kanye's cousin and is Kanye's cousin. And Kanye moved from Chicago to the New York area and started to, you know, blossom as a young hip-hop producer. And the vaum was like, you got to work with my cousin. He just moved here. And we started working together. And I eventually worked on a lot of his early recordings. And he worked on a lot of mine. My demo eventually became my debut album, Get Lifted, and his demo eventually became college dropout, all of which we worked on together.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, that was a good time to ask for a favor. So I'm like, well, I need to transfer to New York. And they were like, okay. So I transferred to New York and that was when things started to really open up for my music career. So I could work all day, but then I would play gigs in New York. I would just meet different people in the industry. I met Kanye during that time. Yeah.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It was. It was a lot of time and energy, but I found time to write songs. I found time to connect with people. And, you know, that first year I was in Boston, which wasn't great for my music career, but I asked them to let me transfer to New York for my second and third years. And they allowed that. And this was a time when the internet boom was happening, that first one, near the end of Clinton's time in office. And young people who were working in these consulting firms were all leaving to go work for dot-com. They would go work for pets.com or whatever.com. Every dot com, every word that had a dot com after it. We're starting to attract all these young smart people. And so our consulting firm was starting to lose people to that. And so that was a good time.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Was no point at which our family income was greater than 50 grand a year. And that was the first salary that was offered coming out of college. And I was like, well, I got to take this job. So I graduate, start working at this consulting firm, and I figure I'm going to get a record deal within a year or two and I can quit this job. By that point, I had already played on everything as everything on Lauren Hill's miseducation album. I did that while I was still at school. And I was starting to work with different producers and writers and recording a demo while I was still in school. And so I figured my big break was going to be right around the corner. But it took five years from when I graduated from school to when I got a record deal. And during that time, three of those years I was working at BCG.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Was doing that sounded interesting. So I applied to BCG and a few other firms. I got interviews with BCG and McKenzie, but I didn't get an offer at McKenzie. I got one at BCG. And it was for 50 grand a year. And for me, that was a lot of money at the time. So my dad was a factory worker. My mother stayed at home with us.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I worked there for three years. I graduated Magna Cum Lade from Penn with an English major, and I knew that I wanted to do music, but I needed a job. Most of my friends were applying to these firms, you know, the banks and the consulting firms. I didn't go to Wharton, but Wharton is right there on our campus. And so we were a big feeder school into a lot of these big firms. And, you know, those were the prestigious jobs that were available. And I didn't even consider that kind of work. I didn't even know what they did. I didn't know anyone that did it until I started to know alumni, you know, who were like a year or two ahead of me who were, you know, coming back to campus to recruit. And one of my friends, her name was Kenna, she came back to Pan to recruit. She had worked at BCG at the time. And she had this event where she was a part of where alumni would come back and speak to black and brown students about these careers that were available to them. And I sat next to her and she told me all about the work.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Not easy. And I was doing my main activities were actually going to school. I also had a work study job at Upward Bound, which is kind of a pre-college program for. And first generation minority students. And then I was leading the a cappella group that I was in eventually. So that took quite a few hours of my week. And then I would drive up to Scranton and do what I did with the choir. So those were my main things in my life. And I did not sleep enough. I was always sleepy Sleepy driving to Scranton sleepy in class. I always tell people I was busier then than I am now for sure, even though I have a family and a pretty demanding career. I got less sleep then and worked more back then in college than I do now.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Had played and sang a lot growing up in Ohio, played in church a lot, and one of our family friends knew a pastor in Scranton, Pennsylvania who was looking for a new musician. And I started just going up there, I think, once a month or twice a month. And eventually they hired me to come up every Sunday. And yeah, it was just all through a family connection, family friend connection. And I started, you know, living a double life where I was a student all week and then I would drive to Scranton on Saturday, rehearse with the choir, and then play for them on Sunday morning and then drive back to school right after Sunday morning service.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Younger than everybody, I'm poorer than everybody pretty much come from a small town when most of the kids came from either big cities or suburbs and major metropolises. And, you know, I just felt out of place in a lot of ways. But again, music was my connector. I started singing an a cappella group there, made a lot of friends that way, and just connected to a lot of other people through music. I started working at a church up in Scranton as well. Where our president is from. I used to drive up on the weekends and play and sing at this church and direct the choir there.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow reading Brian Stevenson's work and reading others work about the system that we've created through policy decisions over the last few decades that dramatically accelerated incarceration and made incarceration the go-to solution for a wide range of societal issues. And those were all policy decisions that were made and those put us in this place right now. And so as an older person, I was able to relate my mom's individual trauma and struggle to all those other millions of people who have gone through substance abuse, mental health struggles, all these other struggles that they've gone through and how we as a nation have decided to treat those issues. Almost with the same solution all the time, which is a lot more and more people up.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The fact that those laws were written by men and by women with frailties and with political points of view and that these were policy choices that these lawmakers and executives made to put our country in the place where we were the most incarcerated country in the world. So I saw the micro view of the individual making a bad choice, but I didn't think at all when I was a kid about the macro decisions that were made to make us the most incarcerated country in the world, to make us, you know, pursue the war on drugs, to make us pursue these tough on crime policies that lock up millions of people every year in America. And so it took me getting older and then reading more about the macro side of things, reading, you know.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, you know what's interesting is sometimes, particularly when you're younger, you don't see the macro view of things. You're just seeing what's happening in your life. And then as someone who avoided getting in trouble with the police, I saw that I was able to do that. And you start to see everything through the lens of individual responsibility. You're thinking, well, my mother made mistakes. She coped with her trauma and her tragedy in the wrong way. And this caused consequences for her. And then I had multiple friends, you know, who got in trouble with the law. You know, some of them were hustling. They were drug dealing. They were involved in situations they shouldn't have been in. And so when I'm younger, I'm just thinking of those individuals and the mistakes that they made and they're being kind of almost like an automatic punishment for those mistakes in the law. But I'm not thinking about”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “In front of an audience. And then it makes it easier for you to be off stage too because I think I became more social when I was able to introduce myself to people on stage through music.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people who are good on stage are also really shy in person and guarded in person. And I was very guarded and reserved and shy. And like I said, I was a couple years younger than everyone too. And so that kind of exacerbated whatever social awkwardness that I had. And so music was that time when I felt like I was in control and I was. I was my full self, and I could express myself fully. And I think it is therapeutic to be able to do that and be on stage and feel like you're being this idealized version of yourself.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “There's no substitute for a mom, and it was tough for us. I think part of the way I coped with it, honestly, was through music. It was through finding other outlets and finding ways to connect with people through music. And part of it was I just wanted to stay busy so that I'd have to go home and, you know, kind of think about the fact that we didn't have our mom there. And I avoided her for a while because she just looked unhealthy. She was addicted at the time. It was a tough time. to see her. And so I kind of avoided seeing her and just threw myself into music and school and all the other distractions that I could find.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And so they took particular care invest their time and energy into making sure I didn't slip through the cracks. And so I'm grateful for those people in my life.”

    2022-08-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 500 — John Legend · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source