In order to find herself, she had to leave the music industry, take a trip down the Nile and learn how to tear down the walls she’d spent most of her life building.
It's early Friday evening in Copenhagen and Alicia Keys is about to
emit some deeply bizarre sounds. These trills and jabbers will loosen
her vocal cords, exercise her diaphragm and guard against any
accidentally bizarre sounds when she takes the stage at the Falconer
Salen, an ultramodern concert hall carved into a boxy luxury hotel. Her
valet, a skinny guy named Francis, enters her dressing room, adjusts
the height of an electric Yamaha keyboard, then disappears to get his
boss some potato-spinach soup. The decor suggests a mail-order
catalogue called
Diva Comfort Depot:
Floral-printed scarves enshroud floor lamps; scented candles glow atop
ottomans draped with light-purple fabric; dainty white ramekins cradle
dried fruits; and in the corner, a humidifier puffs out little steam
clouds of calm. The tableau is a portable monument to
mood. On tour, every night, this is where Keys goes “to get my head right.”
Which is why she’s kicking
Blender out. “You,” she says bluntly, “need to leave now.”
She’s
not unkind about it; if we’re in the room, she explains, she “won’t be
able to vibe” with her vocal coach, and to be fair, if we were about to
perform some warm-ups that split the difference between
do-re-mi and
the call of a marmoset, we’d probably want to cut down on witnesses,
too. Still, the evacuation order is abrupt. A few minutes ago, Keys was
bounding onto the Falconer stage, tugging us along, giddily describing
her show: the video screens, the dance routines, the spinning grand
piano. “Isn’t that cool?” she asked, poking at a vintage Moog
synthesizer stage right. Earlier, when she’d known us only a half-hour,
she pulled some photo-shoot-freebie Gucci sunglasses from her handbag
and offered them up: “I could see you in these. Are they too girlie for
you?” They were, but her warmth was surprising. Keys is a bona fide
superstar in a business running low on the species—her latest album,
As I Am,
has sold well over 3 million copies in just over three months. At 27,
she’s won 11 Grammys. She’s buddies with Bono and Prince. But there she
was, gushing about spinning pianos and offering designer swag to a
stranger with a notebook. Now, though, as suddenly as we were invited
in, we’ve been expelled from the sanctum. Back to making chitchat with
the security dude in the hallway, Keys’s ululations muffled by a locked
beige door.
She’s the first to admit it: Alicia Keys has some
serious boundary issues. She began writing music at 14, and at 20, when
her debut,
Songs in A Minor,
came out, she was instantly anointed a Legend in the Making. A
classically trained pianist and ’60s-soul throwback with a hip-hop
pulse, Keys inherited the throne Lauryn Hill abdicated when she became
the R&B Howard Hughes. But Keys has done it while hiding behind an
impenetrably pleasant facade, revealing nothing. “I’m the best wall
builder that ever lived,” she declares. She’s smiling, but she isn’t
proud: It’s this trait that recently pushed her to the brink of a
nervous breakdown.