Alicia Keys says that her self-titled seventh album will finally reveal “who I am and who I want to be”. The statement is an admission that she’s been holding herself back for years. And who can blame her?
In More Myself, the autobiography Keys published this spring, she gives a powerful account of her hardscrabble upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The gifted pianist (who walked away from a scholarship to Columbia University to pursue a pop career) was the only child of a single mother living in a one room apartment, beyond which: “There were pimps and prostitutes everywhere. There were those XXX-theatres everywhere.” As a young woman, she “definitely learned early how to call the least attention to myself possible”. She wore tomboy clothes, avoided bright colours and carried a knife in order to “be separate from that space that I was walking in”.
