Alicia Keys is famous for her diaries but not necessarily for her revelations. A collection of songs called The Diary of Alicia Keys confirmed her place in musical history. She was applauded. She won Grammys. She was music mogul Clive Davis's new super-diva in the footsteps of Whitney Houston. Phenomenally gifted, vastly driven.
Her first album, Songs in A Minor (2001), spoke from a soul that seemed way beyond its years. She called herself Keys because she plays the piano, and also because it would take many keys to open her up. Or was it because she had the keys to people's hearts? Like everything about her, there are many interpretations.
That landmark diary album two years later was double-edged. Although it's a diary about where she came from, a tiny apartment in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, where she had to carry a knife for protection, much to the stress of her single-parent mother, Terri Augello, it was already clear she was working in territory far from home. Even Bob Dylan announced: "There's nothing about that girl I don't like." On the opening track of his album Modern Times he purrs: "I was thinking 'bout Alicia Keys, I couldn't keep from crying/While she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line."
Keys was born in 1981. It seems like she's lived her 27 years in cat years. Her new album, As I Am, is a shock departure showing just that: Keys stripped down raw, just as she told me it would be. We first met about a year ago, after she'd finished her first acting role in the murky comedy heist Smokin' Aces. She played a sassy lesbian hitwoman who had to pretend to be a hooker and wear teeny skirts and carry her ammunition in her thigh-highs. Maybe a hooker was exactly the woman Keys feared growing up and becoming.
It was a shock exchange. Keys is a woman who in the past had wanted to reveal nothing. And I was asking her to reveal everything. She was out of her comfort zone and went with it: "Trying not to control something is actually liberating. I realised that if I wanted to grow as an artist and as a woman I had to let that ship go."
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She told me about her walls of protection and how she felt she might be losing herself, how she'd worked too hard without ever taking a break, fuelled by adrenalin and not wanting to feel. She went to Egypt alone. "A pilgrimage." She came back and hated everything she'd written for her new album. She started again.
She hoped that I would notice the difference when I heard this album. She'd gone from fearing people's judgment to challenging it. She wanted to be uncomfortable. And then I was approached to talk to her again before her European tour. I was to fly from London to LA and then to Phoenix to talk to her while she rehearsed her appearance at the Super Bowl.
It's a huge deal, only American heroes get the chance to open the event. As I Am has been topping the American album charts since its release in November 2007. Keys is one of America's biggest-selling recording artists and has sold 24m albums worldwide.
The long-awaited interview goes bizarrely wrong but demonstrates what may be going right for Keys. On arrival I'm told: "Alicia can't do the interview today. She's scheduled some personal time I didn't know about, but she'll do it tomorrow." I am angry and sad. Can't find a hotel in Phoenix because of the Super Bowl, and I have no moisturiser or change of underwear. I already know that her never asking for personal time drove her to a terrible place. If I demand to do the interview, what kind of interview would it be? Resentful. Stressful. I go back to LA, leave my house at 4am the next day to catch the only seat on the only plane available to Phoenix. Three hours in Starbucks, then a couple more wrangling with security at the stadium. Eventually a golf buggy takes me to another security check with x-ray machines like in an airport. Another buggy takes me to her trailer.
And she's there, all warm smiles and black Farrah Fawcett hair. She had no idea that I wasn't staying in Phoenix and she thought I'd like to spend the day hanging out with her at Super Bowl rehearsals. For a second she looks stricken, apologetic. She says she wouldn't have liked to spend a night without moisturiser. The fame-making machine of publicists and assistants protects her from any negative details. And yes, there was a time when she took no personal time. She would never have been able to ask for it. "I was insane, I don't know why anybody didn't shake me and say, 'What's your problem?' They tried but I'd say, 'I'm a workaholic but I love it so it's not like work.' There were never any blank spaces, and a blank space is so much fuller than we give it credit for. But it's hard to know that."
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Hard to know that when your life has been filled with non-stop artistic challenges and an unstoppable momentum. She wrote her first song at 14 and was in a group. Her mother was an actress and legal secretary. She got her daughter a gig on the Cosby Show when she was four. By the age of seven she was studying piano. Her mother has spoken about her first burnout coming just before her 13th birthday. She remembers her daughter was in tears because she was overwhelmed, and begged her mother not to add anything else to her schedule.
Keys was raised on the idea that achievement gets you appreciated. How did she decide to stop being this controlling workaholic?
"It was simple actually. I was losing my mind. I found myself going down this spiralling staircase to hell. I hated the person I was and I was angry at everyone, especially myself. I couldn't sleep at all, and I'd never had any problem sleeping. I mean, I could lay my head on this vinyl right here." She points to the stiff-backed grey bench in her trailer. "I was full of anxiety, very insecure.
"My partner was like, 'What's going on with you?' Just let it flow, it'll come together. And I felt I had too much on my plate, too much on my shoulders. I felt like I couldn't depend on anyone to help me. I felt I had to handle everything or it wouldn't be handled. It was the ultimate straw when I started to work on my music and realised I hated it. I was scared I couldn't get it right. My grandmother was ill, and seeing a person that was so strong that I loved very much disintegrating before my very eyes was killing me as well."
She says all of this without stopping but with a curious lyrical quality to her voice. It's like another song, a sad and angry song. Pivotal in all of this was the illness and death of her much-loved paternal grandmother. "My family didn't know how to deal with my grandmother dying. It was pissing me off and I wanted to f***ing kill people. How could they be so selfish? It was like they were leaving it all up to me. 'Alicia will take care of it because she has money.' That made me so mad, and on top of everything else I was feeling more introverted."
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This crisis started in 2005 while her album Alicia Keys Unplugged was topping the charts. The pressure on her was enormous. "It never rained but it poured, and I was so tired and so exhausted for so long. I was finishing my tour and they came to me about doing my first film, Smokin' Aces, right after the tour. It made sense to me at the time. Let's do it. But I was so beat up. Yet everything was phenomenally successful. So I thought, I can do this. I can rejuvenate myself later. But there was no rest. I thought, I have to fix this. I can see how people have breakdowns… I was there. I got it. This is why people end up like a nut." Would you call your experience a breakdown? Short pause. "It was a breakthrough. It was almost like I had to be broken, it was like God's intention to break me down. I had to be stripped down to the bare bones for me to know there was really something wrong."
We talk about functioning alcoholics who feel they can carry on because they still get up to go to work. "Up to a point I was a functioning workaholic, then I was unfunctioning. I couldn't function any more. Everything suffered."
It's always been Keys's way to hide everything. "When I started out I had a media trainer who told me how to control a conversation. If you're talking to a journalist you want them to know your album's out and you're going on tour. You don't want them to know who you're sleeping with or falling in love with, so it becomes this game. Then you think, wow, I can control what I want you to know from me. That's where I got the idea that I could be in control of everything. On top of that I've always been supremely private. I've never wanted people to have an advantage over me. So I don't tell people my secrets, even in the heat of the moment. My closest friends don't know everything about me. I used to think that was good, but it's also bad… "
And do you tell your partner the deepest darkest things? Long pause. "To an extent."
I imagine the pause was about the word "partner". Earlier on Keys had uttered the words "and my partner…" and it shocked me. It was the first time she had even admitted to having one. There have been lots of assumptions about this. For a while people assumed it was the man she's had a long-term writing partnership with, Kerry "Krucial" Brothers. But she's never confirmed this. I have heard from other people that her partner is a woman. For the most part Keys enjoys toying with the intrigue, but part of me feels that soon she would rather have that over.
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When her grandmother died, it took a while before she could say the word "grandmother". She referred to her as "close personal relative".
"After Smokin' Aces I stopped everything to stay home with her. Looking at the positive side, I was able to be with her through everything.
I was with her the night she died. My grandmother was a very spiritual, open-hearted person. We were so close and in fact I look like her. I act like her. I embody her. Losing her made me realise just how much I'd been losing it."
This process of realisation seems to have been a gradual one, punctuated by intense lows. She went to Egypt to clear her mind of all this, alone but not lonely. She called it a pilgrimage, not a vacation. In the past her writing has sometimes been a way not to feel. You experience it and you have the catharsis of writing it down so you don't feel it any more. For this album her approach seemed entirely different. "I think I thought, get it out and it's not inside you any more, it's not bouncing around. But maybe you need to have things bouncing around."
For the first time she wanted to share the record-making experience with other people like Linda Perry, the doyenne of the diva power ballad, who penned hits for Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Pink. They co-wrote the sumptuously painful ballad The Thing about Love. It's all big piano and enormous emotion. It's about how love can undo you and define you. How did she go to that vulnerable place?
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"I think every song on the album has that vulnerability. After everything had happened and the long trip, I started to realise things about myself. What did I want to get rid of? And one of the main things was this control issue I had with work. I suppose it started years ago when I began making a record, and maybe there'd be a male producer sat next to me and somebody would walk in the room and say, 'So how's your record?', totally bypassing me, assuming it was him. Now I'm not going to care. I used to be so calculated: here is the song, here's the chord, here's what I'm thinking, here's the tempo, let's do it. This time I was like, do you have any ideas? Let's flow, let the magic happen. So The Thing about Love is a beautiful example of that."
Have you changed how you are in love?
"I am bolder. I have learnt about love in a beautiful way. I haven't really had to deal with really shitty stuff. A couple of shitty things but not like over and over again. What makes me happy now is following my heart, going with the emotional side of myself as opposed to the rational. What I've learnt is that I was too nice."
Do you mean that you wanted to love and nurture them and they weren't nurturing you?
"Well, that did happen, where you give so much and they think, she gives, I like that, why should I? But there's another thing where you want something from them and you make excuses and say, but I understand, they're going through this, they're going through that, it's not a big deal. I'll never ever ever do that again."
Because you are suppressing your pain?
"Yes, and eventually it comes back to you. It gets to a point where you should have verbalised what you felt when you felt it but you waited too long. It showed me that sometimes your best intentions aren't really the best thing. It's better if you have a big, dragged-down argument, and say, I just feel like this and it drives me crazy, and you really need to know that. You think you are being compassionate and understanding, but it's being fearful and weak to try to accommodate them. It's garbage, it's crap. I needed to learn that."
She also says she needed to put herself in a place of extreme discomfort.
"Experimenting with life means I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone."
But what happens when you make yourself uncomfortable? What do you discover?
"With music I found I opened up a whole other world. Things I wouldn't have tried before. You can get into such a safety net, it's boring."
She talks from a place of unfathomable depth. You know she is knowing but you can never be sure exactly what it is she has known. What is the feeling of being in love to her?
"It's like the first sunrise ever seen from Earth," she says, and looks at me or even through me. She can be emotionally direct, even though she feared it for so long. She grew up as the only child and often an outsider to a strong and determined mother who always expressed her emotions. She told me before that she felt that drove her in the opposite direction. "I've changed now, and I've also learnt that my mother was not exactly who I thought she was. I thought she was like a pitbull in relationships and you know I found out that she was…" She's searching for the right dog. "She's not a chihuahua woman, let's get that straight, but there's parts of her that I just didn't know about, and we are more alike than I thought we were."
Her father, Craig Cook, then a flight attendant, left when she was about two. Her relationship with him was random. To begin with they were quite alienated. Recently, they have started a relationship again. "It was important because at a certain point I realised I had feelings for him and the only person this was affecting was me. Why was I carrying this around? I was the only person it was hurting."
The grandmother she so adored was in fact his mother, so her illness forced a kind of rebirth of their relationship. "So that was a positive thing, and it was cool for me to get to know the other side of who you are. All my weaknesses are from my father. I'm like, 'So it's your fault I'm always late.' And, you know, I used to have that uncommunicative thing? Well, that comes from him too. God had a plan when I was raised by my mother. If I was raised the other way I wouldn't be who I am. I'd be more insecure, obviously I'd be more late, more non-communicative, which how could I possibly ever be." She laughs a huge, all-embracing laugh.
Has she inherited any qualities from him that she likes? "He's a very likable person. Everybody loves him. So hopefully I've got some of that," she giggles. She may have grown up an outsider, always at her piano, keeping her distance and her cool. But there has been a long journey. Now she's more of an insider, a team player. Although she feels that acting was always in her blood, she wanted to start off small and choose carefully. She's currently filming The Secret Life of Bees, with Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and Sophie Okonedo, who she says is "pretty f ***ing amazing. It's a great film and it's so, so therapeutic to me. I play one of three sisters, Queen and Sophie are the other sisters. It's set in the 1960s where these women are entrepreneurs. They raise bees for honey. It's a tumultuous time politically, things are ending and changing, and these women had created their own reality but end up learning how to let go… I guarantee that you will not recognise me. I'm a lot darker in my skin tone and I have totally different hair, a really short 'fro. My character, June, really wants to protect herself," she says, her eyes widening and nodding for extra meaningfulness, acknowledging her own life journey. "These parts come to me and I find I need them. I go through them and I am better."
Next up there's the possibility of playing the jazz diva Lena Horne in what would be her first lead role. "I'm not quite sure yet what I'll learn from that. She's also vulnerable, more than you would know. I think I'm learning that as people we all put on armour every day."
Is she worried that she'll be overwhelmed by her upcoming tour? "I'm excited. I can't sleep for excitement. But I will be doing it in a different way. I have set up some very clear guidelines for everyone, including myself. I will only do two shows and after that I have to have a day off. These songs are spiritual and emotional. It's hard work. And I will have two weeks off before every tour and after every tour."
All the costumes will be designed by Giorgio Armani, a long-term fan. "He is the epitome of a gentleman. The way he looks and acts, the way he sends you gifts, the way he wants a woman to be, a perfect embodiment of how we are."
She really is excited, not overwhelmed about her tour. She is fully aware that it is difficult to be this famous and to somehow escape the paparazzi click click click at your every step.
"I'm very grateful. That would not be a good life. When I was young I wanted everything that Michael Jackson had, but without the crap. I wanted to be talented, break down boundaries, start new trends and last for ever. But I don't want the crap, and I think I've got what I asked for."
It's time for her to step out into the stadium to soundcheck her song and have most of America watch her and know her - but only in the way she wants to be known.
Alicia Keys is touring the UK this week. Her single Like You'll Never See Me Again is out tomorrow