Review
By even the most rigid standards, Alicia Keys’s 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor, was a smash. It sold more than 5 million copies, dropped two Top 10 singles (“Fallin’ ” and “A Woman’s Worth”) and earned five Grammy Awards. Keys, who wears gangsta cornrows and grew up immersed in hip-hop in uptown New York but also studied classical composition and sometimes plays a bit of Beethoven in concert, emerged as a singer-songwriter-instrumentalist-producer with genuine urban swagger: the first new pop artist of the millennium who was capable of changing music.
Only two female soloists in recent memory have so completely wooed the music industry and the public: Lauryn Hill, who followed 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with a puzzling live set, and Norah Jones, who has yet to come behind 2002’s Come Away With Me with a second long-player. So The Diary of Alicia Keys makes Keys the first of these exalted chanteuses to see if she can live up to her own hype and sales.
Still a fresh face at 22, Keys has created an enthusiastic album full of masterful strokes and electrifying intensity. Songs in A Minor was accessible and familiar out of the gate — “Fallin’ ” regurgitated time-honored R&B sentiment without any new depth or insight, save for a James Brown–influenced piano riff, and the album seemed to garner praise for being precocious, sophisticated and boring. A Sting duet seemed moments away. But the follow-up is daring at nearly every turn. Largely self-produced, it encompasses the subtleties of hip-hop and ’70s soul along with nuances of Keys’s classical training, much as her debut did, but with a deftness and explorative verve that were previously absent.
On the first single, “You Don’t Know My Name,” acclaimed hip-hop maestro Kanye West takes a sample from an obscure number by ’70s R&B trio Main Ingredient to create a track as current as it is classic. It’s full of the sweet stuff of a secret crush, and Keys takes the concept further by reintroducing the spoken interlude, a ’70s staple, in the character of a waitress phoning a handsome customer she has admired in the restaurant. Her voice, full of insecurity mixed with determination, exemplifies the refinement on this record. Keys has gotten better at conveying the sensation behind her words, delivering her lines with a shaded, complex emotionalism that sounds as though she’s working through every romantic hurdle a woman her age can face.
On “If I Was Your Woman/Walk on By,” veteran beatmaker Easy Mo Bee tweaks the spinal column of Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By,” leaving exposed nerve endings of tingling sound, as Keys interpolates the piano and words of Gladys Knight’s 1971 soul smash “If I Were Your Woman.” On A Minor’s “Girlfriend,” she expressed similar sentiments, but in a playground way: “I think I’m jealous of your girlfriend.” Here, she’s all pent-up passion, turning a number about dignified, unrequited love into a coquettish advance gilded with attitude.
When Timbaland shows up for “Heartburn,” he seems to cram most of a high-school marching band into a basement party for a finger-snapping, toe-tapping, waist-shuffling jam. But Keys doesn’t need to rely on the day’s hottest rap producers. “Karma” uses flittering strings, low-end keys, splices of a breakbeat and pure street sass to claim retribution on a past lover.
“If I Ain’t Got You” is the type of torch song Whitney Houston would turn into a blazing inferno and Mariah Carey would fashion into a searchlight, but Keys treats it like a candlelight vigil. For “Diary,” she teams up with the two-thirds of Tony! Toni! Toné! who aren’t Raphael Saadiq for acoustic intimacy, cooing, “I will keep your secrets/Just think of me as the pages in your diary.”
When she reaches for depth, Keys sometimes clutches clichés of an almost Bon Jovi–like overfamiliarity. But her grasp of songwriting and arrangement has grown along with her vocal prowess, which lets her bring boilerplate lyrics to life, most notably on “Slow Down” and “When You Really Love Someone.” She’s also capable of strong poetics: “Samsonite Man” is a metaphor for an itinerant lover, and on “Dragon Days,” she equates her longing for a distant beau with a heat that makes “the days drag on.”
No mimicking traditionalist, Keys adores ’70s soul for its generosity, dignity and — this is key — respect for women, qualities she increasingly emphasizes in her own songs. After a vague, overpraised debut, she now sounds like one of the musical masters she reveres.
ALICIA KEYS Her favorite CDs
Prince, Sign “O” the Times
Warner Bros., 1987
“The first time I heard this, I was stunned. ‘Adore’ makes me melt. I’ve played that song a hundred million times. Prince sends you into a world you never thought could be talked about. He puts me in a very anything-can-happen mood.”
Stevie Wonder, Fulfillingness’ First Finale
Motown, 1974
“He’s limitless. There’s this somber song here, ‘They Won’t Go When I Go.’ It’s so melancholy. It’s about loneliness, isolation. Every time I listen to Stevie, I close my eyes, because that’s how you really see what’s going on.”
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
Columbia/Legacy, 1960
“The perfect bath record. You run the bubble bath, put this on, light some candles and just listen. It’s quiet and beautiful, and there are no words, so you can draw your own pictures. He communicates rebellion, and I love that about him.”
Donny Hathaway, Everything Is Everything
Rhino, 1970
“He sang the way he lived: socially conscious, connected to the world. On ‘A Dream,’ he tells a story about a woman, and it’s enrapturing. At the end, he says it was all a dream. It’s sad, but it’s also imaginative, idealistic.”
Only two female soloists in recent memory have so completely wooed the music industry and the public: Lauryn Hill, who followed 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with a puzzling live set, and Norah Jones, who has yet to come behind 2002’s Come Away With Me with a second long-player. So The Diary of Alicia Keys makes Keys the first of these exalted chanteuses to see if she can live up to her own hype and sales.
Still a fresh face at 22, Keys has created an enthusiastic album full of masterful strokes and electrifying intensity. Songs in A Minor was accessible and familiar out of the gate — “Fallin’ ” regurgitated time-honored R&B sentiment without any new depth or insight, save for a James Brown–influenced piano riff, and the album seemed to garner praise for being precocious, sophisticated and boring. A Sting duet seemed moments away. But the follow-up is daring at nearly every turn. Largely self-produced, it encompasses the subtleties of hip-hop and ’70s soul along with nuances of Keys’s classical training, much as her debut did, but with a deftness and explorative verve that were previously absent.
On the first single, “You Don’t Know My Name,” acclaimed hip-hop maestro Kanye West takes a sample from an obscure number by ’70s R&B trio Main Ingredient to create a track as current as it is classic. It’s full of the sweet stuff of a secret crush, and Keys takes the concept further by reintroducing the spoken interlude, a ’70s staple, in the character of a waitress phoning a handsome customer she has admired in the restaurant. Her voice, full of insecurity mixed with determination, exemplifies the refinement on this record. Keys has gotten better at conveying the sensation behind her words, delivering her lines with a shaded, complex emotionalism that sounds as though she’s working through every romantic hurdle a woman her age can face.
On “If I Was Your Woman/Walk on By,” veteran beatmaker Easy Mo Bee tweaks the spinal column of Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By,” leaving exposed nerve endings of tingling sound, as Keys interpolates the piano and words of Gladys Knight’s 1971 soul smash “If I Were Your Woman.” On A Minor’s “Girlfriend,” she expressed similar sentiments, but in a playground way: “I think I’m jealous of your girlfriend.” Here, she’s all pent-up passion, turning a number about dignified, unrequited love into a coquettish advance gilded with attitude.
When Timbaland shows up for “Heartburn,” he seems to cram most of a high-school marching band into a basement party for a finger-snapping, toe-tapping, waist-shuffling jam. But Keys doesn’t need to rely on the day’s hottest rap producers. “Karma” uses flittering strings, low-end keys, splices of a breakbeat and pure street sass to claim retribution on a past lover.
“If I Ain’t Got You” is the type of torch song Whitney Houston would turn into a blazing inferno and Mariah Carey would fashion into a searchlight, but Keys treats it like a candlelight vigil. For “Diary,” she teams up with the two-thirds of Tony! Toni! Toné! who aren’t Raphael Saadiq for acoustic intimacy, cooing, “I will keep your secrets/Just think of me as the pages in your diary.”
When she reaches for depth, Keys sometimes clutches clichés of an almost Bon Jovi–like overfamiliarity. But her grasp of songwriting and arrangement has grown along with her vocal prowess, which lets her bring boilerplate lyrics to life, most notably on “Slow Down” and “When You Really Love Someone.” She’s also capable of strong poetics: “Samsonite Man” is a metaphor for an itinerant lover, and on “Dragon Days,” she equates her longing for a distant beau with a heat that makes “the days drag on.”
No mimicking traditionalist, Keys adores ’70s soul for its generosity, dignity and — this is key — respect for women, qualities she increasingly emphasizes in her own songs. After a vague, overpraised debut, she now sounds like one of the musical masters she reveres.
ALICIA KEYS Her favorite CDs
Prince, Sign “O” the Times
Warner Bros., 1987
“The first time I heard this, I was stunned. ‘Adore’ makes me melt. I’ve played that song a hundred million times. Prince sends you into a world you never thought could be talked about. He puts me in a very anything-can-happen mood.”
Stevie Wonder, Fulfillingness’ First Finale
Motown, 1974
“He’s limitless. There’s this somber song here, ‘They Won’t Go When I Go.’ It’s so melancholy. It’s about loneliness, isolation. Every time I listen to Stevie, I close my eyes, because that’s how you really see what’s going on.”
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
Columbia/Legacy, 1960
“The perfect bath record. You run the bubble bath, put this on, light some candles and just listen. It’s quiet and beautiful, and there are no words, so you can draw your own pictures. He communicates rebellion, and I love that about him.”
Donny Hathaway, Everything Is Everything
Rhino, 1970
“He sang the way he lived: socially conscious, connected to the world. On ‘A Dream,’ he tells a story about a woman, and it’s enrapturing. At the end, he says it was all a dream. It’s sad, but it’s also imaginative, idealistic.”
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