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“I grew up in a very, very, very… difficult area. Put me in some jeans and sneakers and I just feel so good”) as it was a means of survival. It was as much a personal choice (“I’ve always been a tomboy. At a time where spotting pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and gang warfare at work was daily fare, Keys’s sartorial choices – neutral and as boyish as possible – were not just a way of “disappearing” or not attracting “the wrong kind of attention”. I realise there’s a certain amount of armour u have to wear just to make it down the street.” The protection she alludes to isn’t simply metaphorical. In a tweet last year Keys said: “Growing up in these Hell’s Kitchen streets taught me a lot. Perhaps this “grit energy” is also a result of her formative years living in one of the most dangerous parts of New York. She tells me her Italian-Irish mother, Terria Joseph, who raised her single-handedly, juggled three jobs and got Keys practising on a secondhand piano aged seven, is “who I got some of my grit energy from”. Keys’s unlikely trajectory has been widely documented, most recently by Keys herself in her 2020 autobiography, More Myself: a Journey. Oprah calls herself Alicia’s ‘mother-sister-friend’. ‘I could feel the power of her presence’: Alicia Keys with Oprah Winfrey in 2019. Keys is still awestruck that she, and the album that brought her global fame, still have a presence today. She won five of them and has since gone on to win 10 more. The album sold millions (10.5m physical sales and 645.8m streams to date) and Keys was nominated in six Grammy award categories. (Winfrey, who calls herself Alicia’s “mother-sister-friend” has since said, “Even before she belted out the first soulful notes of the lyrics that made her famous, I could feel the power of her presence.”) Following the God-like endorsement of the influential Winfrey (and the backing of Clive Davis, the legendary music producer who gave Keys her big break), the song topped the charts.
ALICIA KEYS ALBUM COVER GIRL ON FIRE TV
Looking at a barefaced Alicia Keys, hair pulled back into a bun, one can’t help marvel at how much she still resembles the 20-year-old who made her 2001 TV debut singing Falling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her voice – smooth, deep and slightly gravelly – calls out, “Good morning!” and as she inches in to take her position close to the screen, she smiles so fully that every crevice of her face lights up. She is sitting on a light-coloured sofa in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of immaculately lined-up books. When she appears on screen there is no “onion”, no entourage, no shock absorber. I am waiting to interview Keys via Zoom on the day she launches a special edition of Songs in A Minor, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking award-winning debut album that started it all. A formidable, multi-layer of managers, confidants, coaches, assistants, a personal film crew and various people with ambiguous job functions formed around Keys, like a “shock absorber”.
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An article written in the Guardian by a journalist who was on the promotional junket described the machinery of her management system at the time, as functioning “like an onion”. I n 2016, when Alicia Keys released her sixth studio album, Here, she celebrated the launch with a gig in New York’s Times Square.