I felt so comfortable coming back to my home base, back to that rawness and exploring even more of this kind of jazzy energy I started with.” Delving into this creative process led Keys “to create a confidence and a level of reckoning and willingness” to return to her roots. “I created the whole album sitting at the piano,” she says. Keys, the singer’s jazziest and most elegant album to date, finds the musician going back to basics. “It took me a while to get to a place where everyone else's opinion and thought didn't dictate my own.” Working on her latest album, though, she stopped asking these questions. With each new release she worried: Will this be the biggest? Will it be enough? How do I keep up and remain relevant? As a result, her sound grew progressively more commercial. In 2000, when the singer-songwriter was 19 years old, she dropped her self-produced debut album Songs in A Minor, which introduced the world to her impeccable piano playing and songwriting skills, and her smooth, soulful voice. By age 7, she began taking classical piano lessons and, at 15, signed her first major record deal with Columbia Records. Her mother, who raised her solo (Keys has reconnected with her father, Craig, as an adult), regularly played records by Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and Stevie Wonder Keys counts the artists as inspiration. I haven’t not known my power, but now I’m clearly aware of all of it, as opposed to just pieces of it.”īorn Alicia Augello Cook, the singer grew up in Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York. “I’m reaching a place where I’m much more confidently clear about the power I possess,” she says, cozy in a Calvin Klein sweatsuit and no makeup.
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But the singer, whose eighth album releases on December 10, says she’s never felt as strong and free creatively as she does now. Yes, she has multiple number one Billboard Hot 100 hits (“Fallin’,” “No One,” and Jay-Z collaboration “Empire State Of Mind” among them), 15 Grammys, and the title of biggest RIAA-certified female R&B artist of the millennium, with more than 65 million records sold (making Keys one of the best-selling artists in the world).
The status, assumed both personally and professionally after two decades of colossal success in the music business, is one she doesn’t take lightly it’s been a journey for the 40-year-old to truly own her crown.
(Sons Prince, 21, and Kasseem Jr., 14, and daughter Nicole, 13, from Dean’s previous relationships, split time between households.) But Keys loves being the queen of her castle. It’s here that we cozy up on opposite black, butter-soft leather armchairs to talk about the singer’s forthcoming album Keys, the launch of her beauty brand, Keys Soulcare and family life.Īt home, Keys is surrounded by a lot of male energy, as she and Dean have mostly boys. Today’s set-up is all Keys, Dean, and, despite the area’s nickname, their kids: Large photographs by Deana Lawson line the walls, a few of Dean’s Cuban cigars sit half-smoked in an ashtray, and electric scooters and two motorcycles flank three red Ferraris. Down the stairs just a bit further is the entrance to the subterranean garage and the area of the house deemed the “grownup floor”-once used as a film set in Marvel’s Iron Man franchise.