![unthinkable alicia keys album cover unthinkable alicia keys album cover](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e5/89/3b/e5893ba088780ca36873d79685a9d5b0--alicia-keys-music.jpg)
![unthinkable alicia keys album cover unthinkable alicia keys album cover](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Unbreakable_single_cover.jpg)
Keys still talks about her in the present tense. She convincingly sells love as the difference between life and death on this heartrending ballad, pleading with her partner: “Every time you hold me / Hold me like this is the last time.” It was written as her grandmother was dying. “No one wants to not be able to get food, or decent opportunities for your kids, but I’ve met plenty of billionaires and they are fucking miserable.” Was its message of rejecting diamond rings a reaction to her sudden wealth? “I’ve definitely never been somebody where money defined me,” she says. Keys uses a triple negative – “I don’t want nothing at all, if it ain’t you, baby” – to brilliantly capture that feeling of never being able to tell someone you love them enough. The result is simply one of the greatest ballads of all time. “Maybe the 80s.” I’ve met plenty of billionaires and they are miserable. “Nobody wants to hear live drums on a record, not since the 70s,” Keys reasons. This song was so good, but we couldn’t land it.” The solution was to record it live, then painstakingly replace each drum sound with programming. “It took me 300 different ways to get to what it sounds like today,” she remembers. She nearly ended up giving it to Christina Aguilera until a baffled intervention from her record company, but Keys still needed to record it. This song, about the pointlessness of material goods if you don’t have the one you love, “poured out of me” on a plane after hearing the news. Keys says she “felt really kindred to her, and I was so devastated that she died – it felt so unfair and abrupt”. In August 2001, the R&B singer Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash. “And record labels don’t tend to be bold.” “We chose it to be the first single – that was pretty bold,” she says. When the chorus comes back in, it’s a fluttering heart turned into song. “And it was about seven minutes long, which is rare, unless you’re Isaac Hayes.” West had an idea to maintain interest throughout: “He was like: ‘You know how on those old-school records, they would just talk for a minute?’” The extended middle eight was duly given over to a spoken-word scene where Keys, playing a waitress, asks out the guy who orders the special every Wednesday. It was part of an extraordinary burst of creativity from West in the wake of a car accident that left him with his jaw temporarily wired shut.Īfter bouncing ideas off one another and working up the song, “we really loved what was happening, it felt magic,” Keys says.
![unthinkable alicia keys album cover unthinkable alicia keys album cover](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8f/e1/70/8fe170a9bc0258ac63ac04cb490786cd--folk-music-alicia-keys.jpg)
Produced by Kanye West and featuring a then-unknown John Legend on backing vocals, this song came as Keys wanted to keep the “mixture between vintage and future” that had sent her debut to No 1 feeling fresh for her second album. These are some of her favourites that did anyway. “None of my songs should have ever worked, to be honest,” she says. Almost 20 years ago, she risked upsetting purists by bringing modern drum programming into classic soul and jazz by embracing a relatively demure image, she risked seeming old-fashioned. She has since won 15 Grammys across six albums, with a seventh, Alicia, out this week, having been postponed (like the publication of this interview) from a spring release by coronavirus. Nevertheless, in 2001 Keys closed the deal in living rooms across America with a career-making performance of her song Fallin on Oprah, a song that “was nothing like anything ever, not yesterday, today or tomorrow”, says Keys. Meanwhile I was 19 with cornrows from Harlem.” All the radio stations thought I was a 40-year-old jazz crooner. “But at the time I was bringing my music into the world, it was not on trend, at all. “If you put me in a room, I will close the deal,” she says, filling her hotel room with infectious CEO energy, all emphatic statements and eye contact. M usicians can be prone to false modesty or putting their achievements down to whatever spiritual energy is currently in fashion.