There’s something ethereal about the way Alicia Keys presents her public persona. She’s mostly on the down low, remaining private and comfortable in her home that she shares with husband Swizz Beatz and children Egypt and Genesis. But when she wants to, she can dominate a space with her grace, beauty and talent unlike no other. Her voice is powerful and soulful, and has the adaptable ability to shift genre, while remaining authentically Keys. In a recent interview with Marie Claire, Keys talked about the balance of her marriage, family and musical career.
“My time is important. I want to have time with my family. I want to raise my kids. I don’t want to always be 60,000 miles away.” Keys said in the interview. But if she does come across the need to travel, she makes it an important and accessible conversation, “‘It’s going to feel like I’m not around as much and you’re going to feel it. I’m feeling it, too. It’s okay. This is a season.’ We have to have these types of conversations.”
With the release of her newest album, Keys, the singer has been busy. It’s not super often that we get new music from her, but when wee do, we know it comes straight from the heart, a pure expression of emotion on to paper and into our ears.
Keys talks about her writing process for this album, and she stated that it was all written with her at the helm, spending time with her piano and with herself. A time to reflect is a time to create.
“It felt so good to just sit there. I felt so comfortable coming back to my home base, back to that rawness and exploring even more of this kind of jazzy energy I started with…,” Keys said. “To create a confidence and a level of reckoning and willingness. I wanted to own my lane.”
And in her own lane she remains, truly, no one does it like her. But this wasn’t always completely visible to her up until recently. Keys opened up about not always realizing that she had the degree of power that makes her stand out. While she says she’s always been strong and determined, which is apparent when you hear he sing, she’s just now beginning to understand her power fully.
“I’m reaching a place where I’m much more confidently clear about the power I possess. I’ve always been strong and determined,” Keys said. “I haven’t not known my power, but now I’m clearly aware of all of it, as opposed to just pieces of it.”
On creating music during a pandemic, Keys stated that she felt somewhat claustrophobic about the process, saying that she didn’t exactly know how to work in the quarantine and at-home condition of the past year and a half.
“I started to go back to stream-of-consciousness writing… I was holding so much. You feel claustrophobic. The world is falling apart, and the government is sh*t and you’re like, ‘What does anything mean?,'” Keys said. “When I would be able to express those anxious feelings and say I’m falling apart, there would be room for things to come in.”
But at the end of the day, grounded by her family, she feels validated. In particular, she wants her kids to be constantly surrounded and reminded of the beauty of Black representation, giving her space a sense of belonging.
“Every room in this house has a beautiful Black face. When my kids walk in this house, they look on these walls they see their beautiful Blackness and it is normal.” Keys said. “That does give you a certain sense of validation or belonging.”
