Three billion times John Legend

To celebrate its twenty years of life the last week Spotify published the charts of the most listened to songs, albums and artists of all time. Among the most played songs on the platform, just outside the top twenty positions, it is present “All of me”song performed by John Legend included in the American musician’s fourth album, released in 2013, “Love in the Future” which, at the moment, matters beyond that 3,063,000,000 streams.

A truly important number that validates the talent of the 47 year old John Roger Stephens – this is his real name – and he lives up to the nickname ‘Legend’, legend, which he gave himself some time ago. That the boy has talent is factual, it would be enough to report that he is one of the members of that small club of those who have won the main prizes dedicated to the world of American entertainment – there are nineteen in total – having completed a EGOTan acronym that stands for Emmy (award dedicated to television) Grammys (award dedicated to music) Oscar (award dedicated to cinema) Tony (award dedicated to theatre). John completed poker by winning the 2015 Oscars for Best Song along with Common for “Glory”, a Tony Award, eleven Grammy Awards and the Emmy Award for the TV special ‘Jesus Christ Superstar – Live in Concert’.

We started from “All of me”the most loved song by the public of John Legendwhich the American musician will not fail to perform live this summer in the four Italian concerts that will be held on July 2nd in Rome, July 5th at the Lucca Summer Festival, July 6th in Marostica (Vi) and, finally, July 24th in Ostuni (Br) (here are the tickets). The song is dedicated to his girlfriend at the time and who shortly after became his wife, the model and TV presenter Chrissy Teigen. Filled with love, Legend said the first time he sang this song to Chrissy, she was moved to tears.

On their wedding day, celebrated on 14 September 2013 in Cernobbio, in the province of Como, John sang it. John and Chrissy are also the protagonists of the video “All Of Me”whose shots were filmed on Lake Como by the director Nabil Elderkin. It was Elderkin who introduced them when he shot the music video for Legend’s 2007 song “Stereo” choosing Teigen as the protagonist.

Talking about the song with Fuse magazine John Legend he explained: “The song expresses concepts that balance each other: even when I lose, I actually win; my head is under water, but I’m breathing well; I give you all of me, you give me all of you. At the same time that you give up everything, you gain everything, and that’s the point of the whole song. If you’re in love and there’s a connection, even when you give up something, you benefit enormously from it.”

While the producer Dave Tozer spoke about the song’s production to SonicScoop: “It’s a very simple and stripped-down arrangement. There’s just piano, vocals, some robotic sounds, a couple of synths and a Moog bass. The weight is all on John’s voice. We were inspired by the song ‘Hide And Seek’ by Imogen Heap, it’s kind of an a cappella tune with all these harmonizers. The robotic harmonization is subtle, we didn’t want to overdo it, but it gives a touch of originality to everything.”

“All of me”
reached number one on the US sales chart, although it didn’t happen immediately. It was in fact released as a single in August 2013, but only reached the top in May 2014, remaining there for three weeks. The performance of
John Legend
to the
Grammy Awards
in January 2014 was a determining factor in the success of the song. After the passage to the Grammys, sales soared by 174% in the following two weeks.

John Legend
wrote the song together with
Toby Gad
who explained to Billboard how it came about: “John knew he wanted to write a song for his girlfriend at the time, and he already had the words ‘all of me’. The writing was very quick, maybe three hours, just the two of us exchanging lyrics. It was a very natural flow, where every word seemed completely sincere.”