You may not experience who John Stephens is, but you're probably conversant with his superstar persona: John Legend. While he may now have the stuff that, uh, legends are made of, his struggle for success has taken the R&B isaac M. Singer through a long trek of trials and tribulations.
John Legend was in a reflective humour when he sat down with MTV News, recalling his early days. "I would dally ... all these small places in New York where a lot of young musicians arrest their start up," Legend aforementioned of his music career after moving to NYC in 2000. "[I would do] whatsoever I could do to get people talking about my music. A couple of days into it, we could get, like, 300 or 400 citizenry to show up at [New York music venue] S.O.B.'s, but at number 1 we were happy to get, like, 50 or 60 or 70 people to show up.
"But that whole grind is just part of how you get discovered, how you develop yourself as a performer," he added. "I think it makes everything I do now more than worth it, because I put in all that time and all that effort."
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and working as a management consultant, Legend made his rounds through the cabaret circuit in New York, performing under his veridical name earlier gaining the moniker John Legend from his peers.
"John Legend is a nickname that some friends started calling me, and it kind of grew into my point name," the singer said. " 'Legend' is something that I never would stimulate chosen for myself primitively. It grew to the point where more citizenry in my circle would know me by that name than by my real name. I had to make a decision.
"I was simply like, 'You know what? Let's just now go for it. People are leaving to pay attention and I'm departure to either live up to my name or I'm not,' " he continued. "My bet was on me trying to live up to the name."
Despite being a solo artist, Legend said, he never went through the grind lone and acknowledged some of his fellow artists world Health Organization struggled with him during his early beginnings, including Jazmine Sullivan, Jill Scott, Bilal and Kanye West.
"Kanye was inactive grinding it out when I was grinding it out," Legend recalled. "We did shows together. He actually opened for me at one point. It was weird, 'cause people didn't know him at all. He was really well-known in the [music] business because he was producing for everybody, just no one kind of in the general public knew world Health Organization he was as a rapper.
"We did a evince at S.O.B.'s, and the crowd was definitely acquiring restless piece he was performing," he added. "It's hard to play a live shew when multitude have no idea world Health Organization you are. I knew he was going to be majuscule and was going to be a big hotshot, but at the clip, no one knew. Little did they know world Health Organization he was going to be."
Two multiplatinum albums and five Grammys later, Legend is prepping to going Evolver in October, with "Green Light" as the first single, and the singer in agreement that his hard work has doubtless paid off.
"You will non make it in this business and succeed over a long period of time unless you work really hard," Legend explained. "I had to learn as I went when I was grinding. And it does make you appreciate your success. It makes you realize that it's truly about the work. It's really around making the best music you canful make. It's really around working hard.
"At the goal of the day, there's only a few major stars in the music business, and then there's all these people that are aspiring to be that."
Make sure to watch the premier of John Legend's "Green Light" video on "FNMTV" Friday (August 22).
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