How Usher Writes a Commencement Speech

At 5:04 a.m. last Monday, Usher sent his publicist an audio file named “My Commencement 2025.”

“What ya think?” one of the world’s most renowned musicians wrote.

He had been awake for hours, tinkering with the speech he would deliver at Emory University that morning. The school was about to feed his script into a teleprompter. But Usher, who allowed The New York Times to peer into his process over more than a month, wasn’t done.

In the dark and quiet of his bedroom, the 46-year-old star was, at last, away from the roaring crowds and hypnotizing special effects of a tour through Asia and Europe. Now he had more edits to make, more lines to weigh, more pacing to measure.

Those adjustments still did not satisfy him. Even after he arrived at Emory, he kept writing.

The fans had filtered out of the O2 Arena in London, disappearing into the darkness, after Usher sang, danced, flirted and roller-skated through a panorama of his career. It was late on April 9, but Usher needed to convene a meeting.

His schedule had vanishingly few openings, and he wanted to talk through what to say at Emory, where he would receive an honorary doctorate.

He had given a commencement speech before, at a conservatory in Boston in 2023. The crowd at Emory, though, would be bigger and more academically diverse, ranging from physics majors to future United Methodist ministers.

The moment would be jarringly different and endlessly more complicated than the one in Boston. As the date of this spring’s speech approached, the Trump administration was pressuring universities and stripping funding from campuses.

A fully improvised address was out of the question. Usher, though, wanted a framework that would leave room for his performer’s instinct.

Lydia Kanuga, Usher’s publicist and the person who would prepare the earliest drafts, observed that he often spoke of “spark.” Shawn Wilson, a fixture of Usher’s charitable foundation for at-risk students, floated a two-theme talk focused on leadership and spark. Chris Hicks, a strategic adviser, pressed deeper and argued that Usher, whose foundation has close ties to Emory, should explicitly blend his life experience with the world’s turbulence.

Mr. Hicks suggested that Usher talk about the times he fell down and then got back up. “That aligns with him,” he said, adding, “because as someone who has a youngster that age, that’s all we talk about: There are going to be some very lean days, and you have to be your own champion.”

“I like that, perseverance and resilience,” Mr. Wilson chimed in. Someone else reminded Usher that the talk would need to include a few moments of celebration, too.

But no speech, the brain trust knew, could be entirely feel-good at a time when a national storm was raging over education. Usher had a political streak — he appeared at a campaign rally for Kamala Harris — but his brand had hardly been a partisan lightning rod. His team urged caution.

Usher said relatively little as his aides talked over ideas. Instead, he peered at a notebook, pen in hand. His vision was forming.

He craved a sensible message for the masses, with easy-to-remember mantras and clear takeaways that were not suffocatingly scripted. He wanted a snappy sound-bite or two and a message imbued with his own story, not just with stock lines.

He had lots of time to fill. Emory wanted his speech to run between 15 and 20 minutes, an eternity for a man whose hits have come in four-minute bursts.

The meeting ended, the gallery of faces vanished, and Usher sat alone, speaking to himself in front of a mirror well past midnight.

Ms. Kanuga started thinking. Usher kept on touring. But he also began to dream about the Emory speech. Sixteen days after the brainstorming session, he said he was sometimes startling awake to scribble ideas.

He had been reflecting on titans of oratory, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Quincy Jones and Denzel Washington, as well as two men who had taught at Emory, Desmond M. Tutu and the Dalai Lama.

Giving a speech at Emory was personal for Usher. It was, after all, going to take place in Atlanta, the city that fueled his rise to fame from a Chattanooga church choir. Speaking in a city where he had become something of a landmark himself would bring a different sort of pressure.

His post-meeting murmurs in London had been a way to test and channel ideas. But at a hotel in Amsterdam in late April, he thought the speech was still in infancy. He had grown adamant, though, that he wanted clear language — the musician who regarded run-ons as his weakness did not want to lose listeners in long sentences.

And he was looking to build a speech that would prove he was not just an entertainer, but also someone who could bring meaning, even without a college education to his name.

“There’s a beginning, there’s a middle and there’s an end, and within that process, what you choose to make people feel,” he said. “Do they smile? Do they think? Do they laugh? Do they cry? Are they angry? Are they motivated?”

Tone, he said, would matter. He was working on his speaking voice.

“In the same way I’ve figured out how tone and algorithm and cadence works in music, it does the same in speech,” he said.

The question of whether politics would enter the text loomed. Usher knew he was not headed to Emory as a candidate for Congress. He also did not seem inclined to ignore the turbulence entirely.

Ms. Kanuga had been trying to translate the ideas from the brainstorming session into a draft that Usher could use as a launchpad for his own turn working on the speech. As the commencement drew near, though, she could only guess what the singer would ultimately decide to say.

Usher landed in the United States on the Thursday before his Monday speech. He had yet to plunge fully into Ms. Kanuga’s latest draft.

Usher texted her the next afternoon. He worried that the script sounded “too corporate.”

“It needs to have more grit,” he wrote, and “more touch points that humanize me.”

Ms. Kanuga asked when they could talk. He replied with seven paragraphs.

He wanted to say how he felt his own school had not understood him — an account he had hinted at only with people who knew him well.

Ms. Kanuga had never fathomed that he would want to discuss it at Emory, but a story that he had never shared publicly would now become the spine of the speech.

“I will work this in,” Ms. Kanuga replied, before Usher sent her six more messages.

Ms. Kanuga emailed the script to Emory officials — with some of Usher’s via-text additions included verbatim, and others streamlined — at 6:12 p.m. on Sunday. The subject line was “Usher speech // FINAL.”

Usher attended a reception that night, honoring him and other honorary degree recipients — an intimate, relaxed setting that left him feeling looser.

Afterward, he stopped for Japanese food and then started fiddling with the script some more.

He dozed off, he said later, with his phone in his hand.

Around 2:30 a.m., Usher was awake and accepting that he would not fall back asleep. Taking command for these final hours, he started reading and rewriting, recording and rehearsing.

His wife, Jennifer, said she stayed quiet. When Usher’s assistant walked in, the singer was still in bed, assessing how the script sounded.

“Just making certain that I pay attention to the beats,” he said later.

He actually felt more comfortable with speechwriting than songwriting, he said. But this process was still much like rehearsing a dance.

“You’re listening, and I’m like, ‘OK, let me slow this down,’” he said. “‘Make that personal. They’re going to laugh at that. Oh, that’s a joke moment.’”

By about 5 a.m., he had “completely changed just about everything” somehow, whether in text or tone or timing — everything, he said, but his intent.

Usher sent Ms. Kanuga his latest edits, and she shared them with Emory at 6:29 a.m., hoping the rewrite would make the teleprompter before the 8 a.m. event. Usher headed to the campus and donned academic regalia.

Backstage, he was still typing changes into his phone. When he heard bagpipers, he thought about the movie “Sinners” and conceived a line about vampires.

Then it was his turn.

He spoke for about 17 minutes and was rewarded with one of the morning’s longest rounds of applause.

Afterward, as he does after shows, he thought about what had worked.

Parents, he said, had been so animated when he spoke about education that he wound up altering the delivery of his next line. When his audience started to cheer a favored section about how “losers let it happen” and “winners make it happen,” he had thought about pausing but pressed on, looking to build momentum. And he had been pleased when the discussion of his own schooling had landed to somber silence.

He regretted nothing.

“I love the fact that it was honest, that it was conversational, that it was me authentically,” he said. “Even the adjustments in the last minute, that’s me. That’s who I am.”