Alicia Keys: Unlocked

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Keys was hustling across the country from task to task—­touring, shooting roles in two movies, starting work on a new album—when she realized the robot had taken over. Part of her wanted to scream, part of her wanted to drop off the planet, but instead she kept flashing the same dead smile of acquiescence. “These people were coming at me, asking these things, and they didn’t really care about me, but I had to give them everything. What did I have left for myself?” she says. “I felt I had to turn on this thing to make it through.”

Soon, it even warped her music. The songs she wrote, her manager Jeff Robinson says, “came out dark, weird, just not her.” As Keys puts it: “I was hanging off the edge of a cliff. Something had to give, or I was gonna lose my mind.” That’s when she pulled the battery out of her BlackBerry and flew 6,500 miles across the globe, by herself. All to get her head right. And, while she was at it, sing her lungs out at the top of a pyramid.

We first meet Keys at noon, in a hotel  room, the day of the concert. Yesterday she played Frankfurt; tomorrow, Stockholm. She’s in Europe promoting­ As I Am, her third album, and also her rawest: On the stomping power ballad “No One” and the Prince-indebted lullaby “Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” her voice is ­striated, aching—there’s a thrillingly bare quality that hasn’t been there before. “It’s the best album of my career,” she says. “So far.”

Keys sits beside a wood-framed window cut into a quaintly sloped ceiling. The roofs of Copenhagen stretch out over her shoulders: little brick chimneys; clay tiles; squat, toylike houses. Her look is hip-hop-Hollywood. From the neck up, she’s a brown-haired, caramel-skinned Veronica Lake: features elegantly sculpted, hair parted on the right and falling down her neckline in gentle waves. A lone fleck of glitter sparkles on her nose. From the shoulders down, she’s an upscale round-the-way girl: crisp Adidas track jacket, designer jeans tucked into suede boots. She sits with one hand pocketed, one holding a cup of tea, each boot planted toughly on the floor. “You’re lucky,” she says, looking us over. “I can tell who someone is just walking into a room. You seem OK.” Her voice is a honeyed purr spiked with an oh-hellll-no edge.

She works a similar combination in her music. One of her favorite roles is the soul meter maid, smacking down tickets: telling us how a real man should act, explaining what a real woman needs. On her latest single, the jubilant “Teenage Love Affair,” she wrings an unlikely romantic thrill from sexual restraint, sending a boyfriend packing before he can round third base.

Keys has become one of pop’s most reliable Grammy magnets: her vibe sufficiently “genuine” and just “urban” enough for the Academy’s voters to feel they’ve acknowledged hip-hop without dirtying their hands on an actual rapper. Unlike other retro-soulsters, she’s unafraid to write a fat, grandstanding chorus. “When Alicia puts out a song,” says Tom Corson, a marketing executive at her label, J Records, “it gets play on urban formats, on Top 40, on adult contemporary. That’s how she still sells tonnage when so many people are struggling.” Her appeal is stunningly wide. What other artist can say they’ve been name-checked in songs by quiet-storm smoothie Luther Vandross, coke-rappers Clipse and His Boomer Excellency Himself, Bob Dylan?