With Django Unchained featuring a soundtrack including the likes of John Legend, Ennio Morricone, Tupac and James Brown, there’s as much hype about its music as there is the actual film itself.

Legend sat down with Rolling Stone to describe the track that he’s contributed to, a soulful number called ‘What He Did To You’. "I had been reading about the film, very early on when it was in development, and I knew I wanted to write something for it," Legend told the publication. "But he didn't ask me to write it.” Expanding on the themes of the song, he commented "It's about retribution, it's about avenging your lover's honor, it's about a desire to find your love and exact retribution on whoever harmed her, which obviously fits perfectly with the plot of Django."

The film’s issues of slavery and racism are deeply ingrained in the current generation of black Americans, and Legend is no different; much of his reading at University concerned African American history, and he saw a chance to take that and pin it to the Django soundtrack. "A lot of my undergrad studies were about reading about American history and African American history, and America's long struggle with racism and how we deal with race and how important that struggle has been to the forming of this country," he said, a University of Pennsylvania grad. "These are things that I have thought about for years."