John Legend performed at the Welsh-Ryan Arena Friday night in, according to group representatives, the most-attended concert in A&O Productions history. With more than 4,000 attendees, Legend’s concert, held in celebration of new Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro’s inauguration, beat out the attendance of Kanye West’s campus performance in 2005.

Legend’s younger brother Vaughn Anthony opened the show with a four-song set. Dressed in baggy jeans and adorned with tattoos and bling, Anthony looked more like a rap star than a Legend sibling. But the family relation was clearly evident in their vocal similarities in songs like the reggae-influenced “She Love Me Not.” While the audience generally embraced his performance, Anthony didn’t fully connect with the audience –- or at least the female portion of it –- until he took off his shirt D’Angelo-style and belted out his last song, “Yell.”

Opening the show with a rendition of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” Legend emerged in jeans and a leather jacket from the back of the arena and sang in the middle of the floor seating. Amid the flashing cameras of eager Northwestern students, Legend reached out to the audience before jumping back on stage and right into “Used to Love U,” a song off of his debut album, 2004’s Get Lifted.

“It’s good to be here for the first time,” he later told the crowd between songs. “It’s good to be back in the Chicago area, one of my favorite places in the world. I’m glad to know [we have] some John Legend fans at Northwestern.”

For an artist whose breakthrough music video consisted mostly of him sitting at a piano, Legend spends a lot of time up and about. Supported by a nine-piece backing band, most of Legend’s performance consisted of upbeat numbers like the cheater’s anthem “Alright” and the hip hop-influenced “I Can Change,” with Legend singing center stage. The first time Legend sat at the piano for the entire duration of a song happened six songs into his set with “Refuge (When It’s Cold Outside),” and it wasn’t an entirely solo effort — Legend’s band kicked in by the chorus.

In the middle of the show, after Legend played some of his slower songs like “Live It Up” and the ballad “Again” — which prompted a handful of students to wave their lighters, cell phones, and iPhones completed with simulated lighter app in the air — the energy of the set started to decline. But just before Legend could lose too much momentum, he’d quickly turn out more upbeat numbers, like “Slow Dance,” from his sophomore release, 2006’s Once Again.

Before his performance of “Slow Dance,” Legend announced, “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” a declaration that prompted a sea of hands of eager female volunteers to pop in the front rows of the floor seating. Legend chose to pull Weinberg senior Evelyn Carter out of the crowd to slow dance with him on stage.

“I was incredibly excited that he picked me,” Carter said. “In a word, it felt absolutely amazing. I’m a huge fan of his and I came to the concert with the goal of getting in the front row and on stage, and I actually accomplished both. I’m still in shock over the entire experience.”

But other than leading audience members in arena-wide hand-clapping and his minimal hip gyrations, Legend isn’t much of a dancer. Yet what his stage sauntering lacks in style, he makes up for in stage presence: During the last song of his set before his encore, the bouncy, André 3000-assisted “Green Light” off his most recent album Evolver, Legend took off his shirt to reveal a white wife-beater and climbed down into the audience to sing a few lines of Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” before returning to the stage and standing on top of his piano for the song’s climax.

During his encore, Legend re-emerged in a new suit and performed his most famous song, “Ordinary People,” by himself at the piano. With the band absent from the stage, it was the only truly solo moment for Legend in the entire evening, and it was also one of the more interactive ones, as Legend instructed the crowd to sing along and finish some of the song’s lyrics.

Yet despite the enthralled audience, “Ordinary People” may have been the only songs students could sing along to.

SESP sophomore Alexis Harrell was one of many students who weren’t familiar with the entirety of Legend’s catalog. “I knew a couple of his songs and I loved them, so I was really excited for the concert,” she said. “Even though I didn’t know some of the songs, he was just a great performer. Anytime he was on the piano was great, even if I didn’t know the song.”

Weinberg senior Carolyn Goldschmidt, the director of concerts for A&O, said this broad appeal was one of the main reasons for booking Legend.

“Everybody thought that he was a really accessible artist,” she said. “And to have a show of this magnitude where we wanted half the student body, you need to get an artist that’s accessible like that.”

Northwestern is not without its Legend fans, however. Weinberg sophomore Ramu Annamalai, a self-described “huge” fan of John Legend, was impressed with the authenticity of Legend’s live show.

“He’s an amazing singer,” he said. “He sings just as well live as he does in the studio.”

A postshow sit-down with John Legend

You have almost a million and a half followers on Twitter. Do you like connecting with fans in that way?

I love it. It’s fun to get a chance to interact and get to know fans, and I think they get to know me better as well.

So your label doesn’t force you to do it?

My management was the first people to encourage me. I wasn’t sure if Twitter was just a silly passing fad and whether it was something I wanted to be a part of. But clearly it has taken root and now that I started doing it, I enjoy it. It gives me a little soapbox whenever I have something to say. It’s fun.

In your live show, you spend a lot of time on stage and not behind the piano. Do you think people are surprised by that?

Sometimes. I’ve been touring for five years now, so some people have seen quite a few shows and they know that I mix it up a bit. My first big song was “Ordinary People,” so people think of me as a piano guy, which I am, but I’ve always been splitting time between sitting at the piano and standing up and interacting with the crowd. I enjoy that because I want to look in people’s eyes and get closer to them and I can’t do all that from the piano.

You’re from Ohio, but you’ve worked with a lot of Chicago artists like Kanye and Common. Does it feel like a second home?

It absolutely does. I love being here. I’ve been playing here for quite a while now. This is the first city that really embraced me outside of New York and my hometown and Philadelphia. Those are places I lived, but I never lived in Chicago. This is the first place I didn’t live in that really embraced me. So I have a lot of love here, I have a lot of friends here. This summer we sold the most tickets here in Chicago when we did our two shows at the Ravinia, more than any other market around the world. So, a lot of love here.

So you’re bummed about the Olympics?

Yeah I was rooting for the Olympics to come here, but you can’t be that mad at [the games] going to Rio. I was definitely rooting for the Olympics to come here, I did an interview on behalf of the organizers and I was hoping it would come here because I love the city and I thought it would be great for the city, but it didn’t. South America’s getting their first Olympics, which I think is cool in a way as well.

I was counting up the songs during the show. How do you manage to make it through such a jam-packed set?

There’s a lot. We don’t play full songs, for most of the things we do little segments of each things. We’ve found we want to give people a taste of all their favorites and keep the show moving. It’s fun doing it that way.

Does it feel weird knowing you’re playing a show for all Northwestern students?

You never know what to expect because you never know how many fans you have at each school. Usually when I come to Chicago, I’ll have some students there, but I’ll have people from a wide spectrum coming. But it’s different coming from this narrow spectrum. You’re always curious to see how well it goes, but this was great tonight. Great crowd, great energy. It was a really diverse audience. It was a lot of fun.

Later this month you’re headed to South Africa to do a few shows. Do you find that in shows overseas, there’s a difference between the audiences and the energy of the show?

South Africans are really a fun audience. They are one of the best audiences I’ve played for around the world, when I played in Johannesburg before. There’s a lot of energy, they love singing along with the songs. Every song, every word. It’ll be fun.

What’s it been like having your brother on tour? Did you find that the dynamic between you has changed over the road?

No, we have fun together. I think he’s doing really well, he’s really connecting with audiences and I’m really proud of him. I’m glad I’m able to take him in the road.

What are your thoughts on Auto-Tune?

I’ve used it in my career a few times, and I’m not against the use of it. I’m against the overuse of it, I guess. I think this little era in time will be remembered as the time when it was overused after a while. Obviously there’s been a bit of a backlash. I think artists have to be careful when they end up sounding just like everybody else. What are you worth if you just end up sounding like everybody else? You have to be careful to continue to push things forward and to be unique and be our own artists. One of the side effects of it is that it minimizes the differences between people’s voices, and you lose some of that distinction and individuality in people’s voices. I think it’s a mistake to overuse it.

You went to Penn. Was it difficult to balance being a student and a musician?

It was difficult because I would procrastinate on my schoolwork. I would do all this singing and writing and everything else but schoolwork, then I would end up stressing out when it was time for exams and everything, so I do not want to relive those moments. It was pretty stressful, but right now I’m in a good zone because I do what I love to do everyday and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. I’m having fun.