Alicia Keys: Unlocked

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She takes a step in this direction on As I Am. She’s said that “Go Ahead” is a Dubya body slam: “What have you given me but lies, lies, lies?” she snarls. But unapprised listeners will hear it as a shimmying rebuke to a dirtbag boyfriend. “Honestly,” she says, “it’s easier for me to write about relationships.” And it’s difficult to imagine her releasing a more explicit song about politics, never mind an anarchist one, given the resistance she provoked when she tried a different kind of explicitness. Recently, she recorded her “most sexual song yet”—until now, she’s alluded to sex only obliquely in her music and frequently championed chastity. “I’m discovering my sexual side. I recorded this song—it’s supersimple: just piano, Rhodes keyboard and a kick drum. It’s so sensual. It moves you,” she says, referring to movement south of the heart. But when she played the song for Jeff Robinson, her manager, he reacted like a squirmy dad: “He popped out of his seat halfway through. He said, ‘We do not record songs like this!’”

A black Mercedes sedan glides through Copenhagen’s narrow, rain-flecked streets, taking us to the Falconer. This is when Keys tells us the singing-on-a-pyramid story. In late 2006, she was exhausted. A deadline had been set for her new album, and she was pinballing between tour dates and movie sets—playing Scarlett Johansson’s homegirl in The Nanny Diaries and a lesbian hitwoman in Smokin’ Aces. “Alicia never liked to say no,” Jeff Robinson explains. “She wanted to please everyone.” When your manager thinks you’re working too hard, you know you’ve got a problem.

“I felt empty,” Keys says. “But the last thing you wanna come off as is a damn crybaby. What the fuck you crying about? I thought you wanted this!”

“I used to say, if you’re not gonna be a bitch, I’m gonna be a bitch for you,” Erika Rose says. “She needed to get back her inner bitch.” But instead, Keys held in her feelings—loneliness, frustration, anger.

Rose remembers the moment Keys finally broke: “We were at a photo shoot, and she got this look in her eyes I’d never seen before. It was not good. She asked everyone to step out of the room, and I stayed with her. There was this lone tear coming down her face. It was five years of accumulation just starting to crack the surface. That’s when everything started to unravel.”

“As her mom, I’d like to say I knew everything that was going on with her,” Terri Augello says. “But there came a time where she couldn’t tell the difference between talking to reporters and talking to her mother. It hurt me to see.’”

Finally, in a maneuver reminiscent of Dave Chappelle, Keys booked a flight to Egypt. She didn’t tell her label she was going AWOL, just bought a ticket, and 48 hours later she was in a first-class cabin, headed to Cairo by herself. She floated down the Nile in a boat, toured ancient temples, swam in the Red Sea and, yep, climbed to the top of a pyramid and started singing. “The strength of a place like that,” Keys says, “the stone, what it took to build, the time—it’s infectious.”

“When she came back, I could see a change in her,” Robinson says. “She was at ease. Now when I do something that pisses her off, she doesn’t hold it in. She smacks me in the face.”

At the Falconer, Keys heads for a second-floor makeup room. We’re asked to wait downstairs. Shortly, walkie-talkies crackle to life: Alicia would like some grilled salmon for dinner. Francis is dispatched. Also: Alicia is ready for us now.

When we enter, she’s wearing a white terry-cloth robe with the hood pulled low, like a boxer prepping for a bout. In an hour, she’ll take the stage, belting her way through a hard-swinging set and shouting, “I’m feeling y’all, Copenhagen!” We tell her it looks like she’s getting ready to pound someone tonight.

“I like that,” she says slyly. “Sometimes I think everyone’s too damn nice.”