2 Weeks After Pregnancy Loss, John Legend Dedicates BBMAs Performance To Wife

Chriss Teigen / Instagram, NBC / YouTube

Just two weeks after Chrissy Tiegen and John Legend lost their baby, The Voice coach took the stage at the Billboard Music Awards on Wednesday (Oct. 14) to deliver an emotional performance.

On Sunday, September 26, Tiegen was hospitalized due to excessive bleeding from her placenta, which required her to have multiple blood transfusions. On September 28th, Tiegen assured her fans that she and the baby were “completely fine.”

But in an Instagram post on September 30, Tiegen told her 31.7 million followers that the baby, who they named Jack, did not make it.

“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before. We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough,” she wrote along with several black and white photos from the emotional process, including one of her and her husband cradling their baby boy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyWQLWpJ3u/

Since then, the married couple has stayed quiet on social media. The BBMAs marked Legend’s first public appearance since they lost Baby Jack. He performed his song “Never Break,” which he released on his most recent album Bigger Love.

The BBMAs host – and Legend’s fellow Voice coach – Kelly Clarkson introduced Legend by saying, “I want to take a moment to talk about a friend who inspires me on the daily. Not only as a musician, a songwriter, but as a human. John Legend is one of my favorite people on this planet and it’s easy for us all to feel that way about them because he and Chrissy just have this warm way of inviting us into their world—the highs and the lows.”

She continued, “My heart, obviously all of our hearts, go out to you both in this very difficult time and I’m thankful that you continue to share your light and your talent with all of us.”

Sitting behind a grand piano, Legend said, “This is for Chrissy,” before diving into the emotional ballad.

The lyrics, which he wrote long before they lost their baby, are so powerful and appropriate for what they are currently going through.

He sang:

“We will never break
Built on a foundation
Strong enough to stay
We will never break
As the water rises
And the mountains shake
Our love will remain…”

Thanks to his time on The Voice, we’ve seen him perform a number of times, but he has never sung a song quite like this before. You can tell that this song has now taken on a new meaning for him since losing Jack. His voice breaks a couple times during the performance as though he is trying to not cry in the middle of it.

Watch his performance below and make sure to have a tissue nearby.