Singer Alicia Keys is in the latest issue of W magazine. In the interview she talks about the struggles she faced growing up, how she followed her own inspiration instead of listening to others when she was working on her debut album.......
We grew up in the city, had a hard edge and obstacles to overcome, but we were still young and beautiful. I didn’t want to
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be all dressed up, all made up—I wanted to be myself, which hadn’t been done before.”
. “How terrible would it have been if I had come out with some watered-down version of who I am?” she says. “People fell in love with the real me, and I still feel blessed that that was how the journey began.”
To commemorate Songs in A Minor’s 10th anniversary, Keys has assembled a deluxe edition featuring early demos, alternate takes, and live recordings from the era, including a classical medley and a sultry cover of “Light My Fire.” The package documents the five-year life of this landmark project, which covered most of the singer’s adolescence.
Keys—recently married to producer Swizz Beatz and, as of October, mother to a son, Egypt—recalls the struggle it took to capture the sound in her head and the frustration she felt at being pushed, over and over, toward a more conventional style. “I was a young girl with very strong ideas but no experience,” she says. “I just knew that everything else I was doing was wrong—that all the suggestions weren’t what was in my mind, they weren’t what it was meant to be.”
Ultimately, it took the almost unprecedented step of allowing her to produce her own music for the streetwise elegance of Songs in A Minor to emerge. (Still one of the few female producers in the business, Keys has since helmed sessions for the likes of Whitney Houston and Jennifer Hudson.) As difficult as the delays and setbacks were, Keys maintains that it was all worth it to make the music of which she dreamed.
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