Making her escape
'SUPERWOMAN started to wear down," her manager, Jeff Robinson, said in a separate interview. "She didn't want the outside world and her family and friends to see her cracking, so to speak. Everyone is used to seeing her so strong and so confident, and just to see her in tears and kind of confused and unsure of herself as was a total shock to most people around her. She didn't know how to handle that.
"I told her just forget about everything, and just go away, just be alone with Alicia. . . . Don't worry about deadlines, don't worry about record companies don't worry about shows. Just go, it will all be here when you come back."
That's what Keys did, escaping for a time to Egypt, and the clarity that resulted not only unburdened her personally but also had a major influence on the new album. While it doesn't depart radically from the soul and R&B forms fans are familiar with, "As I Am" has a freedom and urgency in its grooves that's new to Keys.
"I discovered that I spent a lot of my life feeling like I had to prove myself. People look at a young lady who's a musician and a writer and they automatically think, 'Ah, she's probably OK, she can't really be a producer, you can't be serious, I'm sure there's someone else that's really doing it, she can't really have written all that.'
"Really, they doubt you, and so I think I spent a lot of my first two albums feeling like I had to prove that I could do all of this. So I was very controlling. I would come into a session with everything mapped out, and I think that restricted me in a lot of ways. . . . "There's a certain magic that happens when you just let it go, and this time, because of being able to let go of a lot of things that were holding me back and coming to a more secure place in myself, I went into sessions this time and I was just like. . . . 'Let's see what happens.'
"You're definitely hearing freedom, searching for freedom, self-realization and strength and vulnerability, and everything that happens to everyone, every day."
And don't expect to wait another four years for her next work.
"I would really like to put out another album relatively soon. Something that's a bit more stripped back. . . . I already have about six or seven records for it that I love. I just want to keep creating. . . . The last record and the last tour, I went so hard that I kind of took away that side of me. And when it came time to come back around to create again it took me a while to find my groove. I just don't want to ever get that far away from it again."
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richard.cromelin@latimes.com
