John Legend on Headspace: Expanding what "wellness music" can sound like

On April 15, 2020, EGOT winner, entertainment mogul and tabloid fixture John Legend was the first guest on “Take Ten,” a new Instagram Live series hosted by the meditation app Headspace. After some polite talk about adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic (“just hanging out with the family more”), Headspace co-founder Andy Puddicombe guided Legend through a two-minute meditation.

The situation felt awkward, and not just because Legend had only recently downloaded Headspace or felt self-conscious about closing his eyes in front of the captive audience. Unlike subsequent “Take Ten” guests like comedians Chelsea Handler and Kevin Hart, Legend confessed during the stream that he doesn’t actually meditate on a regular basis. “I feel like I should do that,” he admitted.

Imagine my surprise, then, when four months later, Headspace appointed Legend as its first Chief Music Officer, to help launch the app’s new “Focus” mode for working hours. Tasks for the quasi-C-suite role include curating a playlist by a different musician each month. The partnership with Legend could open doors for artists who aren’t lifestyle gurus, by helping expand our ideas of how “wellness music” can sound.

“Wellness music,” as defined by the Global Wellness Summit, refers to music intended to heal, whether in the physical or metaphysical sense. It encompasses music therapy, the resurgence of ambient and New Age music among wider audiences and even “listening bars” as a reprieve from screen time.

But what most readily comes to mind are the mystic sound therapies readily found on yoga retreats, and now in a crowded landscape of meditation apps. Inscape offers sound baths, or meditations to ambient noise. Insight Timer features crystal bowls to “entrain us energetically to higher, more refined vibratory frequencies.” On Sattva, you can listen to ocean waves washing ashore, as curated by a foundation led by Indian meditation guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Calm, Headspace’s biggest competitor, launched its own music brand in 2019, with Courtney Phillips Spoehr, formerly of Universal Music Group, at the helm. The app’s featured roster is diverse, from Julianna Barwick (modern New Age) to 5 Seconds of Summer (pop punk) and, believe it or not, Disney (“Disney Piano” being traditional renditions of its animated movie songs). But even artists accustomed to pop airplay, with their undeniable melodies, must retrofit their sound to Calm’s specific ideas surrounding “wellness music”: Softer tones, slower builds. Its latest app-exclusive preview was of Diplo’s MMXX, the producer’s first ambient album.

After introducing its “Sleep” mode with corresponding music two years ago, Headspace launched its new “Focus” mode for those “struggling to focus as the boundaries between work and personal life become more and more blurred,” in the words of Deborah Hyun, the company’s vice president of global marketing. (Headspace declined an interview request for this story.)

Along with the requisite soundscapes and meditation exercises for scenarios like giving a presentation, the “Focus” mode launched with Legend’s own studying playlist — at least, the sort of music he studied to at the University of Pennsylvania during the ‘90s. He ended up with an eclectic mix of rare and avant-garde jazz, the most recognizable name being Afrofuturism pioneer Sun Ra. Yet, in an era of pervasive “coffeehouse music” on streaming services, the overall experience of working to his playlist still felt familiar.

Legend’s overall direction as Chief Music Officer became even clearer this month, with a new Focus playlist by Madlib. The hip-hop producer and longtime Stones Throw affiliate is best known for his obsessive crate-digging and celebrated collaborations with MF Doom, Kanye West and Freddie Gibbs. Yet Madlib’s reverent instrumentals have also found a new life in an era where the “lo-fi” beat aesthetic is being co-opted in functional settings by streaming services, celebrity YouTube channels and meditation apps alike. Songs off 2003’s Shades of Blue, 2007’s Beat Konducta Vol. 3-4: India and 2014’s Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton soundtrack are featured in Spotify’s “Chill + Atmospheric” and TIDAL’s “Study Station” playlists.

Madlib begins his hour-long Headspace playlist by catering to those who associate him with “lo-fi” or “chill-out” music these days: Seconds in, he opens an analog hip-hop mix with the sound of vinyl crackling. Yet halfway through, he shifts to driving 808s and skittering hi-hats — hallmarks of trap music. This change in tone and aesthetic doesn’t feel intended to fade into the background.

Aside from these celebrity-branded playlists, Headspace’s “Focus” mode features a handful of other playlists that don’t credit any artists. “Steady Stream,” with its prominent Moog synths, is immediately reminiscent of Mort Garson’s 1976 curio Mother Earth’s Plantasia, which was reissued by Sacred Bones Records to mainstream coverage last year. “Zoom Out” features synthwave, a subgenre that took cues from French touch to become the soundtrack to the ultraviolet (and ultraviolent) Drive and Hotline Miami. Interestingly, listening to one of these focus playlists in its entirety registers as a “meditation” for Headspace, counting toward a user’s daily run streak and overall stats geared toward building regular habits around the app.

These are all relatively niche genres and sounds evoking the sort of nostalgia that puts listeners not necessarily ready to focus, but immediately at ease. Moreover, none of this is music typically associated with wellness, not like the sound of Tibetan bowls.

The wide-ranging scope of Headspace’s focus playlists, and the role that music plays in Headspace’s overall user experience, suggests that the company isn’t so much concerned with how a meditative state, or even a flow state, can be perfectly engineered. Rather, as one of the leading players in an increasingly competitive market, Headspace is concerned with growing its user base — primarily through multimedia content and partnerships — to consumers and celebrities who had never thought to meditate before.

On the consumer side, gently suggesting that Madlib or synthwave could qualify as “wellness music” could make “mindful living” seem more attainable to fans of those genres. And for artists, gently suggesting that “wellness music” can take on more forms than we may have realized — with pop/R&B and hip-hop artists like Legend and Madlib as first movers — could make the wellness industry seem like a more accessible business opportunity than they otherwise imagined.

This seems deliberate coming from Headspace co-founder Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk who “has made a career of promoting a quick and easy, religion-free brand of meditation,” as The New York Times observed in 2011. To be clear, Headspace’s broader ideas about how a meditative state can play out for anyone, in any setting, aren’t new: As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in 1995, “mindfulness practice is not confined to the sitting position.”

That being said, Headspace is expanding far beyond just a vertical brand focused on meditation. It has evolved into an all-encompassing lifestyle brand — a “platform for mindful living,” in Puddicombe’s words on The Tonight Show. At the same time, artists like Legend continue to search beyond music to monetize their careers through partnerships and endorsements with lifestyle brands. Even in a pandemic, the lifestyle embodied in the “wellness industry” can still be flashy and come with a price tag — encompassing $60 “cellular skincare” supplements, $66 vaginal eggs and $69.99 app subscription fees, as with Headspace. But increasingly, the playing field is also addressing fundamental concerns: Rest, relaxation, physical and mental health.

In one way, collaborations like the one between Legend and Headspace seem to turn the criteria for music-brand partnerships on their head, suggesting that artists no longer need any preexisting “authentic” relationship or experience with a brand to become the face of its campaign. But this collaboration also falls right in line with artists’ evolving career paths, as well as Headspace’s business goals. Just as how Puddicombe stressed to Legend that he’ll see the benefits of meditating with just a few minutes each day, Headspace wants us to see how every minute living mindfully, in whatever form they decide, should count — and be counted.