John Legend is not only an executive producer of the new film, Southside with You, but he also contributed to the movie’s end credits song called “Start.”
“I don’t know where the road leads / You don’t know if I’ll break your heart / We don’t know how the winds will blow / And we won’t know / We won’t go unless we start / Ooh, ooh, start,” he sings.
Speaking on the song, Legend told film critic Roger Ebert, “I was really in the feeling of the film. The score was already set, so there was this music playing, leading into where my song would come. I even tried to make it fit the key of the previous music that was coming in, and I was just staying in the spirit of where the music already was. ”
He added, “And I wanted to write something that was intimate, because the whole film is very intimate to me. Even though they’ve lived these big lives, this date, and the film, are both very simple and intimate. I wanted the song to feel like that too. And the lyric, of course, kind of talks about the idea of the start of a relationship, and the uncertainty that you might feel something new with somebody and you don’t know where it’s going to go, but you know it won’t go anywhere unless you start [laughs].”
Southside with You was inspired by Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date. The film recounts the eventful summer day in 1989, when a charming young law associate named Barack Obama (Parker Swayers) tries to woo reluctant attorney Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) during a daylong date. Their date takes them from the Art Institute of Chicago to a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to a sweet first kiss outside of a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor.
Listen to “Start” on Apple Music below. Southside with You is in theaters now.
