MUSIC; To Be Alicia Keys: Young, Gifted and in Control (original) (raw)
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MUSIC
- Jan. 27, 2002
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January 27, 2002
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Section 2, Page
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PRECISELY one week before Christmas, Alicia Keys was in her dressing room backstage at Madison Square Garden, there to repay fate and the airwaves for a very good year. She was on the bill for ''Miracle on 34th Street,'' the annual benefit concert sponsored by the radio station WKTU. Playing the unpaid, all-star shows that radio stations exact from hitmakers every December, Ms. Keys had been bouncing all over the United States: Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and, just five days earlier, another Madison Square Garden show for WKTU's rival Z-100. The next night she would be back in Los Angeles.
If she was tired, she didn't show it on stage. Sitting behind her piano at sound check, she sweet-talked the show's backup orchestra like a rhythm-and-blues Goldilocks: ''That groove was a little too fast, the other one was a little too slow. We're going to get it right in the middle and it's going to feel good.'' During the concert, she poured her voice into two songs that propelled her debut album, ''Songs in A Minor,'' to sell more than four million copies in six months: ''Fallin','' about a turbulent romance, and ''A Woman's Worth,'' a soul-ballad manifesto of mutual respect.
Like most of her album, those songs plunge into the unsettled domain of female identity in the hip-hop era, determined to work their way through conflicting imperatives: to be both independent and loving, both sexy and respected, both vulnerable and strong. The girls that filled the audience sang along wholeheartedly.
Backstage afterward, Ms. Keys clicked through pager messages and huddled with her band's music director, brainstorming for her first headlining tour, which started on Wednesday and brings her to Radio City Music Hall this Friday and Saturday. (The tour will pause on Feb. 27 when Ms. Keys performs on the Grammy Awards telecast. She has been nominated in six categories, including best new artist and song of the year for ''Fallin'.'')
Her manager, Jeff Robinson, handed around the latest update of her schedule, and Ms. Keys singled out one notation. ''I don't understand this,'' she said, showing it around the room to her assistant, her mother, even the visiting journalist. ''Can you tell me what this means?''
The calendar read, ''Day Off.''
A month later, between tour rehearsals, Ms. Keys made time for an interview. On a day also packed with photo shoots and costume fittings for the tour, she had rented two rooms at a midtown hotel: a penthouse for the photos and fashion, a smaller room to talk. Wearing a floppy leopard-patterned hat, a butterscotch leather jacket and pants and sharply pointed black boots with shiny metal spike heels, she brewed a cup of Awake tea, thumb-typed one more message into her two-way pager and settled onto a couch to consider her life, her songs and her plans.
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