A few nights earlier, Keys was playing in a more typical setting, for an invited audience of music business figures, celebrities and media members at a small soundstage near Silver Lake. The intimate affair was one of a series she's done around the country, part of the job of building anticipation for the new album.
But even here, allusions to troubled times surfaced. Sitting at the piano to perform the new "Superwoman," Keys offered that she wrote the song during "a time when I wasn't doing very well." In the lyric, a "Yes I can" anthem of self-renewal, she describes herself as being a mess.
That was a difficult image to conjure, considering how impeccably put-together Keys looked at 10 a.m., even after getting in late the night before after a stretch in the recording studio. Wearing a metallic jacket and sparkle-pattern T-shirt, she was upbeat and lively, leaning forward to make sure she was heard clearly.
The success of those first two albums, "Songs in A Minor" and "The Diary of Alicia Keys," came with a price, she said.
"I did go through a time where I was very uncertain and insecure, because everything around me was falling apart. I was a wreck, and I couldn't really hold on to anything, so nothing really made sense.
"So when I then tried to create music, it was confusing and it was disjointed. It didn't come together. I had these ideas, but they didn't work. I was very frustrated about that, because I felt like that's my one sanctuary."
Keys experienced an intensely emotional time attending her maternal grandmother, who played a big role in her upbringing, through a fatal illness, but she said that her own problems stemmed from the demands of her work. She's tirelessly committed to the process of performing and promotion that stoke a prominent career, but after "Diary," she found things spinning out of control.
"For a minute there, I was doing things that were not humanly possible, and it was just a miserable way to be. . . . I had to learn from it or die, one or the other. I'm serious.
"All of it, every side of it. Never saying no, always doing everything, accepting everything. Every inch of space was taken up with something to do and somewhere to be and someone to call and someone to talk to and someone to meet, and it's too much.
"I came to a point last year where I was just sick of being that. Sick of holding in these emotions that I had that were really eating away at me. So I became very rebellious about that, very rebellious about people telling me what they thought I should do and what they felt was good for me."
