John Legend on Kanye West: 'The World Needs Him'

John Legend sends love to Yeezy.

In the wake of Kanye West’s hospitalization, longtime friend and collaborator Legend explains how he feels after seeing his friend’s trying year.

“This is a very difficult life and a difficult business,” he told Rolling Stone. “I don’t want to try to play pop psychologist, so I’m not gonna try to analyze what’s happening with him. I just want him to do whatever he needs to do to feel better and to feel like he’s ready to go again, because music needs him. The world needs him. I think he’s such an important talent. We need him at full strength.”

Part of his answer was also about Kanye’s balance. “How do you balance everything you do – acting, producing, music, fatherhood?” he asked. “You start with knowing what’s most important to you. My family is most important and then second is music. My music career is the reason I have the power to do everything else. There’s a lot of power in celebrity. I obviously use it to sell my own projects and produce TV, and, you know, I use it to get reservations at restaurants too [laughs]. But you try to use it for something that’ll benefit the world too.”

During the interview, Legend didn’t address his stance on Kanye’s Donald Trump bond, but he did explain his disdain for the President-elect. “It’s a bit of a challenge ’cause we don’t know who he is all the time,” he said. “He’s been consistent about being a racist and about a couple of other things, but he’s also been wildly inconsistent and lied a lot. So we truly don’t know how he’s gonna govern. We haven’t seen anyone like him before. It’s a very kind of different world now, knowing that someone’s going to possibly dismantle a lot of what Obama accomplished. I don’t know where we’re going to go…He’s truly reckless.”

Legend is coming off the release of his most recent album, Darkness and Light, which dropped earlier this month. Meanwhile, West is reportedly working on a follow-up to The Life of Pablo.