Concert Reviews

Legend hit the Boston stage with a sense of confidence, accomplishment, and maybe a bit of entitlement.

By Marc Hirsh

November 8, 2025 | 1:56 PM

4 minutes to read

John Legend at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025.

Looking back on how John Legend became a star with the release of his debut album Get Lifted, it’s easy to see his rise as practically preordained. There was hustling and hard work involved, of course — there would have to have been for an artist as hands-on as he is — but his pre-fame CV looks like a series of opportunities practically falling into his lap, from getting in good with Kanye West while he prepared his own blockbuster debut to stumbling into a Lauryn Hill session while still in college.

Even Legend’s family background — his father a drummer, his mother the church choir director and his grandmother the church organist — practically ordained a successful music career for the young child. When he took the MGM Music Hall at Fenway stage on Friday, 20 years after Get Lifted, it was with a sense of confidence, accomplishment, and maybe the teeniest smidge of entitlement. This, the singer seemed to say without saying it, was where he belonged.

Get Lifted may have provided the hook for the concert, but it didn’t strictly provide the structure. While Legend played (most of) the album, and in (mostly) the album’s running order, he refused to be bound by it. He opened with the silky R&B of “Prelude” and shifted to the splashy drums and jazzy chords of “Let’s Get Lifted,” and the soulful horn stabs that lifted “Used To Love U” step by step, before jumping away from the tracklist with “Heaven,” flitting uninterrupted from song to song.

From then on, he dipped out of the album periodically, sometimes just for a song or two and sometimes for an extended reminiscence of his journey up until then, including the time he worked as a management consultant in Boston and lived so nearby on Commonwealth Avenue that he could have walked to the show. He spent some time midway through going all the way from his childhood church bona fides (represented by Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” Legend’s voice colored by the quaver of both the searcher and the true believer) through his pre-stardom work via a medley that touched on Bilal (“Soul Sista”), the Roots (“You Got Me”), Estelle (“American Boy”), Jay-Z (“Encore”), and Alicia Keys (“You Don’t Know My Name”).

If there was just a touch of self-aggrandizement there, Legend largely justified it by showing that his own music — even as early as his first album — could be equally varied and versatile. The gospelly swing of “It Don’t Have To Change” was written to provide a vocal showcase for the family he grew up singing in, and it sat comfortably in the same set as the hot-blooded and strutting “She Don’t Have To Know,” which the singer inhabited so fully that it could be exhibit A in the divorce proceedings if he and wife Chrissy Teigen ever split.

Most of the songs fell between those two poles (or, in the case of the Staple Singers’ “Let’s Do It Again” — whose languid bounce provided a spotlight for backup singers SheNice Johnson, Natalie Imani and Keri Lee — touched on both). Legend offered confident promises on the streamlined, nocturnal hitch of “Tonight (Best You Ever Had),” the warm and generous “Good Morning” captured the morning after the quiet storm, and the breathing rise and fall of “Refuge (When It’s Cold Outside)” had the blooming sunshine of contemporary gospel.

Legend was able to pull it all off thanks to his mastery of inhabiting seemingly contradictory positions. Sometimes it was simply musical, like the way that “Number One” was fired up and easygoing at the same time, and “So High” only took tiny steps forward but was marked by ecstatic upward movement. Sometimes it was emotional, with even songs about heartbreak (in both directions) like “Heaven” having a fervor to them, and the whole show being a mix of the carnal and the spiritual.

And sometimes it crept into places where it might not have intended to. Bringing an audience member up to dance with him on “Slow Dance” raises questions a man who isn’t notably single man might not intend to raise, even if the woman in question (named Tamryn, or possibly Tamron) was fully up to the task, shimmying up to the singer and throwing faces at the crowd in response to his entreaties.

Legend began his encore alone at his piano singing his hallmark devotion song “All Of Me” — alone except for the audience singing along, of course — and like much of his ostentatious gratitude and generosity that he expressed throughout the night, it came across as overpracticed sincerity. That, of course, isn’t sincerity at all, and if that’s too much to expect of any pop star, then at least Legend showed how a crack band and a deep, innate musicality were enough to sustain him for two hours, and 20 years.

Setlist for John Legend at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, Nov. 7, 2025

• Prelude
• Let’s Get Lifted
• Used To Love U
• Heaven
• Alright
• Tonight (Best You Ever Had)
• She Don’t Have To Know
• Let’s Do It Again (The Staple Singers cover)
• Number One
• I Can Change
• I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (The Beatles cover)
• Take My Hand, Precious Lord (Thomas A. Dorsey cover)
• Medley

• I Only Have Eyes For You (The Flamingos cover)
• Ooh Laa
• Save Room
• Sun Comes Up
• Good Morning
• Heaven Must Be Like This (The Ohio Players cover)
• Ordinary People
• It Don’t Have To Change
• Stay With You
• Like I’m Gonna Lose You (Meghan Trainor cover)
• Slow Dance
• Refuge (When It’s Cold Outside)
• So High
• Green Light

ENCORE:

• All Of Me
• Live It Up

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

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