John Legend speaks ahead of Birmingham show

But for all of his success, John is still striving to write the perfect song and create an exceptional live show. The star is back on the road with a headline gig at Arena Birmingham on Wednesday, alongside special guest Jack Savoretti.

It’s part of his Darkness and Light Tour, which started earlier this year and has been a hit around the globe.

He made his Darkness and Light album, his fifth studio recording, with producer Blake Mills. The duo agreed early on that every song must have an emotional edge – they put a ban on any songs that were about nothing and on any moment that didn’t have an artistic purpose.

John and Blake pushed one another out of their comfort zones. Blake wanted John to create something with the same emotional punch as artists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

It was a tough process and they had to be frank with each other in their pursuit of excellence. John says: “We had some songs that were more challenging than others because a lot of the songs I wrote with other writers were more in the pop world. So a lot of it was trying to marry the quality of the song but produce it in a way that felt like it was right for what we were trying to do. The struggles we had weren’t about fighting with each other. It was us fighting with the songs, trying to figure out exactly where a song should land, what the production and arrangement should be around it. The joy in doing that is eventually you’re going to figure it out. And once it feels right, then you know it’s time.”

John wrote the record during a period of transition. He had become engaged to model Chrissy Teigen in 2011 before they married in 2013, at the time of his Love in the Future record. Their daughter was born in April last year, when he was making Darkness and Light. The record was released six months after her birth.

“Some artists come up with the title before the album. For me, I write the songs first and discover where I’m going. While Darkness and Light is the name of one of the songs, those words also just kept coming back to me. There’s a lot of darkness in the world, pain and conflict. But the album also represents the desire to find light, optimism, love and joy in the midst of all of that. Then there was another thing I didn’t put together until a few weeks after my daughter Luna was born.

“The song that was playing when she came out was Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly. I was just randomly playing songs when Chrissy was like, ‘Speed it up, I’m tired of these mellow songs’. So I played more uptempo songs and Superfly happened to be playing when Luna came out. And the first line of that song is ‘Darkest of night with the moon shining bright’. We didn’t think of that when deciding on her name. But in deciding the name of the album, all of these separate things ended up coming together, kind of a confirmation.”

John first aired the record in the UK when he played at a public piano at St Pancras International train station, in London. The episode was filmed by passers-by and made enough of a splash to feature on TV news and all of the national newspapers.

He is a fan of going off piste and doing the unexpected. “It was so much fun, I loved it. I don’t do them that often but that was truly impromptu, no one knew that we were coming. We knew we were gonna do it, but they didn’t know, so the fans that were there were truly surprised, and they seemed pretty happy and I was happy to do it. We’re gonna play these big venues with all this production, it was nice to do it stripped down at St Pancras.”

John’s stock has continued to rise over the years – and he’s still enjoying the afterglow of Love In The Future, which was a number two hit in the UK and earned him a platinum disx.

It was produced by John with Kanye West and Dave Tozer and featured guest appearances from Kimbra, Rick Ross, Stacy Barthe and Seal. The record featured four hits: Who Do We Think We Are, Made to Love and the worldwide smashes All of Me and You & I (Nobody in the World).

All of Me took his fame to a new level, which is why his UK tour is the biggest he’s ever done. The record was the most popular TransAtlantic hit since Pharrell’s Happy. It was written to his soulmate, Chrissy

“The biggest thing for the song was my Grammy performance. It took it from here to there. You never know what’s gonna propel these things.”

The song was created with Toby Gad, who’d previously worked with Beyoncé. Legend had been encouraged by an old friend to write a song with a similar message to Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman. “She knew my relationship with my then-future wife, so she thought I should write a song like that to Chrissy.”