“Right by You (for Luna)” is addressed to Mr.
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Through most of the album, romance has as much to do with conflict and obsession as with comfort. It starts out with allusions to Black Lives Matter and taking pride in upward mobility but ends up, after an appearance by Chance the Rapper, with the singer settling into hedonism, enjoying “my favorite mix, a little ignorance and bliss/In the penthouse, baby.” Legend quickly pivots back to love and pleasure with the rhetorically awkward yet undeniably catchy “Penthouse Floor,” which has a touch of Stevie Wonder in its dance beat. So is the song that closes the album, “Marching Into the Dark,” which moves from guitar-plunking gospel roots into surreal modern production and ponders individual sacrifice and the course of history.īut for the rest of the album, Mr. Legend showed on “Wake Up!,” his 2010 album with the Roots, and in “Glory,” his Oscar-winning song for “Selma” with the rapper Common. Legend declaring, “Some folks do what they’re told/But, baby, this time I won’t” and adding, “My history has brought me to this place/There’s power in the color of my face.” It’s a connection to the socially conscious side Mr. The album begins with a manifesto: “I Know Better,” a gospelly hymn that has Mr. Legend nearly alone, singing over simple, fading chords: pop with all of its misgivings built in. “Love Me Now,” already a hit, is a seize-the-moment song with an overt sense of doom about the relationship: “I know it’ll kill me when it’s over.” Its track revolves around an insistent, lo-fi piano figure, and its chorus first arrives with Mr. Among the songwriters, along with pop-factory names like Julia Michaels and John Ryan, is Will Oldham, who’s also known as the indie-rocker Bonnie Prince Billy. Drum tones are often woody and hollow keyboards and strings open up hazy spaces, sometimes without a beat.
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Legend’s music turns less glossy: earthier and often spookier. With a producer and co-writer from outside the usual precincts of pop and hip-hop - the guitarist Blake Mills, who has worked with Alabama Shakes and Fiona Apple - Mr. In his new songs, love can be a counterattack on mortality, a dangerous compulsion, a realm of sweaty adventures, a legacy from father to daughter, an escape from social media and a bulwark against forces of divisiveness. But “Darkness and Light,” his fifth studio album, treats love as something far more complex than a panacea and a fount of perpetual reassurance, with music to match. Without it, the love songs that regularly place him in the Top 10 - megahits like “All of Me” from 2013 - are anodyne enough to work as wedding songs they’re a worthy and lucrative enterprise that can leave an unctuous, saccharine aftertaste. A little darkness serves John Legend well.