JOHN LEGEND

Earlier this year, Quincy Jones penned John Legend’s profile for the 2009 TIME Magazine “100 Most Influential People” issue where he honored Legend for his “complete understanding of where he comes from, musically and spiritually.”  The respect is a two-way street, with Legend just out of the studio where he recorded “Tomorrow” for an upcoming Quincy Jones tribute album.

He has sold more than five million albums worldwide, garnered multiple hit singles (“Ordinary People,” “Used to Love U,” “So High,” “Save Room,” “Heaven,” “Another Again”), received countless awards (including six Grammys) and wowed rapt audiences across the globe.  It is no wonder Legend has earned such high praise from Quincy Jones, as well as many other of the music industry’s most respected producers who clamor to work with him. Fashion aficionados can’t get enough of his incomparable style. And the humanitarian community has rallied around his fight to end poverty.

Critics have called Legend a genius, one of the most compelling and important singer/songwriters of this generation, an elegant ambassador of soul.

With all of the acclaim, it would be easy for John Legend to rest on his laurels, but he continues to push himself, always striving to break new musical ground. “Some people have been making the same album for years and they don’t really push the envelope,” Legend says.  “That’s not me. Expect me to experiment. Expect me to always approach the music in new and different ways.”

He proved he was no ordinary R&B singer with his outstanding debut Get Lifted and he successfully evaded the sophomore jinx with the classic Once Again.

John Legend has come a long way since his days as an in-demand session writer and musician working with Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others. Born and raised in Springfield, Ohio, the singer (born John Stephens) began playing piano at the age of four; he was singing in his church choir by seven and blossomed into a choir director in his teens. He began to work his way into the Philadelphia music scene while studying at the University of Pennsylvania (where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1999). Kanye West gave Legend his first big break when he signed the artist to his G.O.O.D Music production company in 2004.

It would prove to be one of West’s smartest decisions. Legend’s debut, Get Lifted, opened at #7 on the Billboard Top 200 sales chart and turned the singer into an overnight sensation. Featuring the hit singles “Ordinary People,” “Used to Love U,” and “So High,” the album quickly became both a critical and commercial success, selling more than three million copies and earning Legend a slew of awards (including Grammys for Best New Artist, Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B album).

In 2007, John Legend launched the Show Me Campaign (ShowMeCampaign.org), a grassroots movement whose mission is “to break the cycle of poverty by investing in solutions that have been proven to improve people’s lives and to give them the opportunity to help themselves through education.”

In 2008, with the release of Evolver, his third consecutive Top 10 album, John Legend embarked on an extensive world tour with his ten-piece band, his largest traveling production to-date. The new album’s name is as succinct as it is bold, a one-word mission statement encapsulating the singer’s ambitions. “I am constantly evolving as a person and as an artist,” says Legend. “You still have the legacy of what you did before and the people’s memory of that will always be there, but with each album you get to question that, to play with it and even rebel against if you want to and I did that with this album.”