On Wednesday night at Barclays Center, John Legend played a concert that was almost entirely made up of songs about love and lust.
“Love is in the air,” said the Ohioan, somewhat stating the obvious. “You might get some tonight.” And yet, for all the romantic sentiment Legend served up with, the show itself was boring enough to leave you sterile.
The stripped down and intimate set-up of the current “All Of Me” tour is a direct result of its namesake single. After being released last year, it finally became the soul crooner’s first No. 1 hit in May and he now finds himself playing to a huge number of new fans.
But instead of bringing them up to speed with his ten years of stylistically varied neo-soul, the show was more about pandering to the idea of him as a drippy balladeer. The lite-funk of his early singles “Used To Love U” or the slinky groove of “Save Room” was nowhere to be found as Legend decided to tinker on a grand piano like a glorified wine bar act, right down to his cheesy white blazer.
Even the songs from his latest album “Love in the Future” sounded heavily neutered. On record, the spacey “Who Do We Think We Are” features Rick Ross and benefits from the production touches of Kanye West but onstage, it merely sounded like the kind of anonymous and mildly irritating music you hear in Starbucks. Legend has always been weighed down with accusations of being bland but this was the kind of set that virtually drowned him in insipidness.
By the end, even his so-called fans seemed unengaged (one guy next to me felt the need to check minor-league baseball standings on his smart phone) but a large number of the sold out crowd were there primarily to hear “All of Me.” Finally, Legend gave it up at the very end and the song’s horrid sappiness was laid bare. Written for his model wife Chrissy Teigen, the schmaltzy piano notes and nauseating lyrics about “perfect imperfections” sounded even cornier when being sung politely by an arena full of people. It’s become a popular song for couples to have played at their weddings and yet, “All of Me” is the musical equivalent of forgetting Valentine’s Day and stopping at the gas station on the way home from work to sift through what’s left of the Hallmark cards.
The really sad thing however, is that John Legend already looks doomed to be associated with this song for a long time to come. Shame, because all of him is much more than “All of Me.”