She’s even joined as a coach on reality show The Voice, which hounded her to sign on for years. She wowed at the UEFA Champions League final. Take this year alone: She performed at July’s Democratic National Convention (technically speaking, former President Bill Clinton opened for her) and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Because the 35-year-old is, in short, busy as hell. I’ll be right back.” I patiently wait on the other line, a position I’m sure a lot of people have been in with Keys these days.
But can you give me five minutes? I need to run in and get my son out of his class. In the middle of getting into more heady descriptions, Keys pauses, graciously. This is the Alicia Keys you’ve wanted her to be ever since Songs in A Minor catapulted her to global fame in 2001. In the years since, the star born Alicia Cook in Hell’s Kitchen has taken off her makeup while locating the sweet spot where expression and social consciousness meet.
“Coupled with the fire that’s in the world is the inescapable fire in myself.” Don’t mistake this flammable rhetoric as picking up where 2012’s Girl on Fire left off. This was the first time I created music with such intention,” she admits. We’ll be whoever everyone wants us to be.
“We allow ourselves to become censored because we don’t want to offend people. “It all started with uncensoring myself,” she tells me of the album’s impetus. Like a lot of big records these days, it’s hush-hush, without a release date or even song titles. “It’s constricting, you know? You have to stand to play this type of music.” The Troubadour performance was the first taste of a forthcoming, as-yet-untitled sixth studio album, her first in four years. “I’ve decided I don’t want to sit at a piano anymore!” she tells me about the gig two months later over the phone from her car in NYC. This still-untitled track hit the hardest with lines like, “Sick of being judged, sick of being sick / I don’t wanna be a fallen angel.” Afterward, she turned to the transfixed crowd and said, “The world has lost its motherfucking mind.” I had goose bumps, even before I noticed Pharrell Williams was standing behind my shoulder. Her hair towered Cleopatra-style, her face was bare-revealing every bead of sweat-and she beamed and performed with carnal sensuality like her life depended upon it. A straight-shooting New Yorker, she threw her hands at her piano while standing upright. “And so it persists, like a bottomless kiss, an illusion of bliss, an illusion of bliss,” the soulful singer-songwriter, pianist and self-assured maverick spoke-sang over gutsy chords. It chimed with events from two weeks earlier: the police shootings of African-American citizens Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, incidents that galvanized the movement Black Lives Matter. No phones were allowed inside the venue at Alicia Keys’s one-off surprise gig, during which she debuted never-before-heard material with purpose. In an era before the internet, July 20, 2016, at the Troubadour in L.A.
0 kommentar(er)
