Observer News Service

London

Recently, 50 prominent music industry types from around the world gathered in a small room in New York’s Avatar studios. To listen to half a dozen new songs. A few were bored, some were hungover, but as soon as the music started everyone snapped to attention.

The six tracks were the first recorded output from 22-year-old soul singer Alicia Keys since her debut album ‘Songs in A Minor’, released in 2001, sold 10 million copies and won five Grammys, an unprecedented haul for an artiste who had been virtually unknown just a year earlier.

The pressure to provide a successful follow-up was considerable; a ‘sophomore slump’, the industry term for a disappointing second album, would be an expensive failure. As Internet file sharing and piracy continues to plague record companies, a proven multi-platinum artist such as Keys is an increasingly rare thing. The American music industry has been aided in recent years by a new generation of confident female singer-songwriters, although some, including Macy Gray, Alanis Morissette and Lauryn Hill, have been unable to recreate the success of their debut records. Would this be Alicia Keys’ fate?

The playback went well and after a 45-minute performance for her international guests, Keys returned to the studio to finish the album. The Diary of Alicia Keys, released on December 1, 2003, was largely written, played and produced by Keys, an indication of how much power she wields. In fact, despite her youth and modest demeanour Keys is an uncompromising artiste who bears little resemblance to more conventional superstars such as Britney Spears. Keys is a classically trained pianist who opens her shows with Tchaikovsky and loves Chopin. Her musical breadth was used as clever marketing tool during the promotion of her first album: apparently she is happy to borrow a phrase from Beethoven, then hire a hip-hop producer to add the final polish.

Politically, too, she knows her own mind. Two days after 9/11, she told a journalist: “I look at that flag and I’m not able to completely go there; I see lies in that flag.” Success has made her more circumspect but she still takes issue with American foreign policy; her recent ambivalence about the war, however, has been diplomatic. When a TV channel asked her to record a message for the troops, she paused before striking a compromise: “Well, I do feel compassion for them. But I definitely don’t want to lie. So I said, ‘Keep your heads up and search for the truth.’ I wonder what that meant.”

In recent interviews she has been increasingly reticent on the subject, aware that her words can be twisted. Either way it has saved her getting mauled in the way of country band the Dixie Chicks.

Keys’ unlikely success certainly reads like an all-American fable. She grew up in a deprived part of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, the daughter of a white mother and a black father. Her dad left home when she was two but her mum, Terri Augello, a paralegal and actress, was determined that her daughter should prosper.

“She’s been a huge influence on me,” Keys has said. “I saw a woman handling herself in a bad situation. If she’d been cowering under pressure, depending on a man to take care of her, I know I’d have grown up to be a whole other person.”

She is also aware of what her mixed-race heritage actually means. “My background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures,” she has said. “But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that’s how I regard myself.”

Mother and daughter shared a one-room apartment with Alicia sleeping on the couch. By the age of 13 she was taking dancing, singing and piano lessons. A few years later she had graduated two years early as valedictorian from high school, winning a scholarship to study performing arts at Columbia University.

By this time she had a manager who, it is rumoured, persuaded Columbia Records to sign her for $4,00,000. The deal didn’t work out; Keys wanted to write ballads, Columbia wanted her to make uptempo R&B. “It was a hard, depressing, frustrating time. The record label had the wrong vision for me. They didn’t want me to be an individual. They just wanted to put me in a box.”

Her salvation came in the shape of Clive Davis, the veteran music business boss. Rolling Stone magazine recently called him “the greatest record man of the past quarter century” because he has enjoyed unparalleled success since the late Sixties: his discoveries include Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin and P Diddy. In 1999 he founded his own label, J Records, and looked to find a classy singer with crossover appeal, perhaps in the same mould of another famous signing, Whitney Houston.

After he heard Keys perform he pronounced her a “unique artist” and got to work using his extensive contacts. His masterstroke was persuading Oprah Winfrey to allow the unknown singer to be the first performer on her music special, where she performed her debut single, “Fallin”, and almost left the host speechless. Shortly afterwards, “Songs in A Minor” entered the Billboard charts at number one.

While Davis hand-picked Houston’s early material and controlled her image, he let Keys have the freedom she desired.

Nearly everything about her is a throwback. Her tremulous voice and songwriting ability have drawn numerous comparisons with Aretha Franklin, while her concern for social issues is similar to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.

Her image, too, is inoffensive. She doesn’t wear Afrocentric threads or skimpy outfits favoured by many of her peers, opting for a kind of high street chic instead. In 2001, however, she appeared on the cover of style magazine Dazed & Confused with her jacket and shirt open, no bra, leaving one hand over her breasts, the other pulling down her jeans. “For the record, I hate that cover. I feel taken advantage of by it,” she told Q.

In the 12 months after the release of ‘Songs’ she appeared on 15 American magazine covers, from Rolling Stone to Essence. This time she will be ready and appropriately dressed.