John Legend Opens Up About His Family's Miscarriage And The Decision He Had To Make About Kanye West

john legend on the daily show with trevor noah
(Image credit: Comedy Central)

A lot of people would agree that one of our most popular celebrity couples is made up of the fabulous duo of John Legend and Chrissy Teigen. Fans have followed the EGOT winning The Voice coach and model/cookbook author/social media star through a number of ups and downs over the years, including Teigen’s bullying scandal in 2021, the 2018 fallout between Legend and Kanye West, and the recent joyful news that Legend and Teigen are expecting another child. Not long after revealing the pregnancy, Legend has now opened up about his family’s miscarriage, as well as the decision he had to make about West.

What Did John Legend Say About Dealing With His Family’s Miscarriage?

Fans are always overjoyed when their favorite famous couples have good news to share, and in August 2020 everyone who follows Chrissy Teigen and John Legend was made pretty happy when Teigen confirmed they were preparing for their third child with a look at her pregnant belly on Twitter. Sadly, it was just a few weeks later that the couple revealed that they’d suffered a miscarriage. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Legend spoke about that time when asked about the single, “Pieces,” from his new double album, Legend. The singer said:

This song has some of that optimism—we’re going to get through this, we’re going to cope—but we’re not ever going to be the same as we were prior to this grief. I certainly felt that way after we lost our baby, in 2020. You learn to live with that grief and carry it with you. It doesn’t have the same weight and pain, but you’re never the same again…in my relationship with Chrissy, it made us stronger, going through this together, even though we were broken in some way by it, because we had to hold each other together and support each other through it. It’s a way of forging you, if you handle it the right way as a couple, and I think that’s what it did for us.

Legend noted that a line from the song which says, in part, that “grief was a teacher” feels “absolutely” true to him, and while that time in their lives was obviously extremely difficult, it did eventually lead to his marriage with Teigen becoming “stronger.” Legend and Teigen were also very open about the miscarriage, and he added that he was wary of the move, but appreciated the purpose of being vocal about it soon after:

Chrissy felt like she needed to share it…It felt dishonest and weird not to acknowledge the fact that something happened. I was more reluctant, because I’m more guarded about sharing pain than she is. But, once she did it, I almost immediately saw the wisdom of her doing it…what it did was open up more of a conversation among people who were afraid to share that kind of detail, who felt ashamed if they lost a pregnancy. We still meet people who thank Chrissy for sharing that, because they’ve gone through the same thing and it made them feel less alone.

What Did John Legend Say About His Friendship With Kanye West?

The interview soon turned to Legend’s background growing up in Ohio, and later to his early years trying to make it as a musician, when he worked with fellow struggling artist Kanye West on what would become his mega-hit first album, The College Dropout. The two had been friends for many years when they began to butt heads over West’s endorsement of Donald Trump, and West’s own bid for the presidency. Though Legend admitted a few months ago that he learned a lot from West about how to “not be overwhelmed” by success, he did have to ultimately agree to disagree with West when it came to politics, and leave the idea of them being friends up to the controversial rapper:

I don’t know what will happen in the future, but he was very upset with me that I didn’t support him and I supported Joe Biden. It’s up to him whether he can get past that.

John Legend seems to have released any ill will he may have held about Kanye West’s political actions, and appears willing to mend fences if his famous former friend is able to do the same. Luckily, Legend has plenty of good things going on in his own life with Chrissy Teigen and their growing family, so he’s not likely to spend much time worrying about whether or not West will come around.

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.