Other standouts include “Surefire,” with eerie strings, and the title track, a scratchy soul-rock duet with Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes. So the struggle is worth it.”Īlong with its powerful lyric - “What good is a dream when the dreamer dies?” Legend sings - “Marching Into the Dark” shows off the album’s distinctive sound, with Mills’ nimble guitar playing over a lurching funk groove. But I’m optimistic enough to know that even the little wins count. “Everything I talk about - improving our schools, prison reform, making sure everyone has an equal opportunity - I don’t know if we’ll ever get there,” he said. Legend said he was familiar with that uncertainty.

They’re struggling for an end they may never see.”

“The metaphor we use is that they’re chasing a fading star into the dark. Mills said he and Legend were drawn to the way Coates “doesn’t purport to have all the answers” to the problems he lays out, which inspired them to write about those issues in an “emotional” way.Īs an example, Legend pointed to the album’s closer, “Marching Into the Dark.” It’s about “the idea of struggle and the idea of putting your life on the line for an important cause,” as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. One path opened up thanks to “Between the World and Me,” writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ acclaimed 2015 book about the state of race in America. He also worried about merely echoing the work of others, such as Marvin Gaye, whose landmark “What’s Going On,” from 1971, is “the perfect album that was sensual but also political at the same time,” Legend said. “It was a struggle to figure out how to do it without seeming corny or pedantic.” “But the things I think about when it comes to policy, they don’t sound good in a song,” he said. It’s not that Legend didn’t want to try this earlier. Sitting in a small green room before an invite-only performance this month at a Los Angeles art gallery, the 37-year-old born John Stephens said his goal with the album was “just to be honest and talk about the things I’ve been thinking about.” “Some folks do what they’re told / But, baby, this time I won’t.” “They say, ‘Sing what you know’ / But I’ve sung what they want,” Legend declares to open the 12-song set. 2, it takes up some of Legend’s familiar themes but puts them in the context of what he referred to as America’s “political unrest.” The album also retools his sound, moving away from the slick pop-soul arrangements for which he’s known toward a moodier, more organic vibe he developed with producer Blake Mills and a diverse cast of top-flight musicians.

Yet the singer’s two sides begin to come together on his tellingly titled new album, “Darkness and Light.” Due Dec. Nor were you glimpsing a harmless heartthrob when he appeared on Maher’s HBO talk show days after the presidential election and said of Donald Trump, “We have a racist running the country.”

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