Alicia Keys: Unlocked

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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.

She built her first wall as an 11-year-old, to deal with the pimps and strip-club shills who’d catcall at her in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, as she shuttled between music lessons, ballet classes, school and the apartment she shared with her single mom. Keys took to camouflaging herself in cornrows, baggy jeans and Timberlands. “One hundred times a day, it was ‘come dance for me,’ ‘come work with me,’” Keys recalls.“ At 11! So my mentality was Protect yourself. And that took me right into the music game.” She kept the wall up (and the cornrows on) when, signed to a contract with Columbia Records at 16, she had to fend off the advances of music producers more interested in sex than music. “I was meeting all these people who just wanted to use me,” she says. “Or be with me.”

“I always felt I had to be this machine,” she continues. “Like I couldn’t show any weakness.” Those feelings were only confirmed when rumors started circulating, almost the day Songs in A Minor dropped, that Keys was a closeted lesbian. “It doesn’t bother me, because I’m straight,” she says. “Every great, strong woman has been called gay.”

Problem was, a little more than a year ago, she discovered that she couldn’t take the wall down anymore. Not for her manager, not for her mom, not for her closest friends. “It was like talking to a robot sometimes,” says Erika Rose, a childhood buddy who spent several years working as Keys’s day-to-day manager (and self-described “bulldog”). “She was always, ‘I’m fine! I’m great!’ I’d put my hands around her neck, like, ‘Tell me you’re not fine!’”