Fallin' to the top

The life of a newly-minted superstar can be a time-consuming juggernaut. Indeed, the life of a newly-minted superstar’s mother can be a time-consuming juggernaut. Exhibit A: Therese Augello, mother of chartbusting sensation Alicia Keys, is running around a New York rehearsal studio trailing her newly-famous daughter with measuring tape. “I didn’t even have time to measure Alicia for her fitting,” she says. “I was like, ‘Can I measure you while you’re asleep?’”

Not that Keys is going to sleep anytime soon. Just hours before, Keys arrived in Manhattan from LA, the airline conveniently losing her luggage. She was then spirited straight from the airport to the rehearsal studio, where she and her band are preparing for a series of high-profile New York shows. In a cavernous space the size of a football field, Keys is the eye in a hurricane of managers, publicists, musicians, dancers, entourage, and yes, Mom and that measuring tape.

Already, that fitting is going to have to be pushed back, along with everything else. It’s past 7:00 p.m., and the end to Alicia Key’s day is nowhere in sight. Still, Keys remains chilled out. Despite the frenzy surrounding her, she’s unfazed, moving from place to place in that I-ain’t-goin’-nowhere-in-a-hurry hip-hop strut that belies her roots as a Noo Yawk street kid. “Life’s been hectic,” Keys explains, taking a long, cool sip from her Glaceau vitamin water. “I’d much rather it be hectic than ‘Damn, why aren’t they calling me?’”

The winner of six Grammys including “Record of the Year” and “Best New Artist,” Keys shouldn’t worry: they, whoever “they” are, should be calling for some time. Right now, Keys is ubiquitous, ‘Fallin’’, her first single, proved irresistible to today’s fickle music consumers. With its gospel chorus and Billy Holiday-esque vocals colliding with state of the art funk, Keys showed herself to be a prodigal hybrid of the best in popular music. Keys further secured her position as one of the today’s most notable stars when she hit the charts equally as hard with ‘A Woman’s Worth’. Her supple vocals are technically adept, yet eschew Mariah Carey-esque grandstanding for Mary J. Blige’s raw-wound flavor.

“Mary’s one of my idols,” Keys explains. “I met her once briefly at my record company’s Grammy party. She gave me props, and I gave her props. She asked me to teach her how to play the piano! I was, like ‘Okay, sure’!”

At the same time, Keys eludes easy genre pegging. There’s hints of alt-rock angst in her words (Keys is a big fan of Nirvana) and the ghostly trip-hop of Portishead, another favourite, in her sound. She’s also a classically-trained pianist (‘Fallin’’ includes a snippet of Chopin, while her album begins with ‘Moonlight Sonata’) who makes the occasional R&B cliché swing with the kind of innovative syncopation that would cause Duke Ellington to pause. And then there’s that whole “neo-soul” thing, with the media trying to proclaim Keys as the next Erykah Badu, the next Lauryn Hill.

“People always say ‘What do you think about the whole neo-soul thing you’re being categorized into?’ It’s cool, it sounds good, but I don’t want to be in a category,” she explains, spitting the word ‘category’ out of her mouth like it was poison. “I love Mary, I love Biggie – I’ve broken three tapes of Ready To Die, I’ve played it so much. I also dig old-school like Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Aretha; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On changed my whole perspective on music. I love people who have a spirit that you can feel.”

Alicia Keys definitely has that spirit, and the public is definitely feeling it, but her unique talent wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. Before she released her debut album, Songs in A Minor, at the beginning of July last year, Keys was a (barely) 20-year-old unknown. Before she signed with J Records, Keys had been laboring unproductively for two years in a deal with Columbia Records, who snared her in a bidding war when she was just sixteen.

According to Keys, Columbia were trying to shape her into something she wasn’t – an issue that has resonated throughout Keys’ entire career.

“When they heard the album and realized it wasn’t quote-unquote pop, they were not feeling it,” she says. “They hoped that I could be something more predictable, but I couldn’t do that.”

In fact, nothing about Keys career so far has been predictable. The album, presented with little hype and infrequent radio play, debuted at number one in America, lodging itself with seeming permanence in the top five for weeks and weeks. In its first two months, Songs In A Minor sold a phenomenal three million copies, while its first single, ‘Fallin’, crested at number one as well. As a nation watched, a star was born.

The drama didn’t stop there. Key’s success cemented the arrival of J Records, the latest venture from legendary music mogul Clive Davis.

Beginning in the ‘60s, when he was at Columbia Records, Davis nurtured the careers of everyone from Janis Joplin to Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith and Earth, Wind and Fire. After Columbia, Davis went on to found Arista Records in 1975, where he took everyone from Barry Manilow to Whitney Houston to the top of the charts; artists ranging from Patti Smith, TLC, Sarah MacLachlan and OutKast to Dido and the artist currently known as P. Diddy all found their careers exploding under Davis’ Arista reign.

Indeed, Davis’ touch has seemed nearly alchemical over the years. With Davis, Aretha Franklin revived her dormant career, and a supposedly washed-up, Woodstock era guitarist named Carlos Santana ended up selling oh, 26 million copies of his 1998 Grammy-studded comeback album Supernatural, which Davis lovingly executive produced.

However, despite Supernatural’s success, Davis was unceremoniously ousted from Arista in 1999. Rumour filtered down that Arista’s parent company BMG was nervous about Davis’ age (he’s 69) and lack of heir apparent, as well as his maverick entrepreneurial tendencies (with all his triumphs, who could tell Davis what to do?).

So when Davis started J Records as an “instant major” following his Arista exit, the music industry was abuzz as to whether he could continue repeating his successes from scratch. While Keys was not J’s first release – that honour would go to the manufactured boy-band O-Town – it was the one that proved Davis could still deliver on all fronts.

In fact, a recent Entertainment Weekly article on J’s rise focused largely on Key’s contribution.

“Alicia’s album is the ultimate: artistically unparalleled, critically acclaimed, yet also commercial,” Davis says. “It’s like a movie that’s up for an Oscar is also a top-grossing film. Over the years, I’ve had different types of artists. Some, like Aretha or Whitney, don’t write songs, but their vocal genius speaks for itself. But when you deal with a Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Annie Lennox, Sarah MacLachlan, or Dido, it’s a different mentality: you let them be themselves because it’s their vision.

“Not to exaggerate, but when you’re dealing with a genius, you want to find out what their visions of themselves are right away. I immediately put Alicia in that category. To make her succeed, it was a matter of letting the world find out what this young renaissance woman’s vision of herself was.”

“Mr. Davis approached me differently right off the bat,” Keys says of her initial meetings with J. “He asked me ‘How do you see yourself as an artist in 10 years?’ No one ever asked me that before. I don’t think anyone ever really cared. I told him I just want to be able to be myself, and be allowed to change, evolve, grow.”

Realizing he had an unusual artist on his hands, Davis took an unusual route to get Keys into the public eye.

“Our objective was not to trust the system, or radio formatting,” he explains. “Pop radio said ‘Fallin’’ was too urban, while urban radio was asking for a faster tempo. But when I put her onstage at my Grammy party in 2000, the Tonight Show discovered her and asked to put her on – before the album came out. Then I sent the video to Oprah, which I’d never done before, and she called me the next day to put her on. Those appearances electrified the country.

“All this happened before the single had made it or the album came out. The buzz just kept building until, lo and behold, the album came in at number one. Then radio caught up, and now the pop audience is discovering her after the album’s gone to the top. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, and you don’t expect to enter at number one.

“This is a tough business, and I take nothing for granted. Sarah MacLachlan’s first album sold 52,000 copies, yet her fourth sold close to 7 million. Springsteen didn’t break until his third album, and when I signed Carlos I never expected to sell 26 million copies worldwide. It’s an incredible way to begin.”

MTV also factored greatly into the making and breaking of the Alicia Keys phenomenon.

“Clive did a showcase for her, and people came back buzzing that she was amazing,” says Tom Calderone of MTV. “It was an emotional, soulful, relatable reaction. That doesn’t happen a lot. There was definitely intrigue there.”

So when Davis called Calderone a month later to personally play the video for MTV, he jumped at the chance.

“Presidents of labels will come when they feel passionately about an artist,” Calderone says. “The last time Clive did it was with Whitney’s last album. I grabbed the entire department and we all sat there. Usually, when Clive introduces an artist, he’ll go off about how he found the artist and why it’s important to him. This time, though, all he said was ‘I’m not going to say anything, other than you guys will be blown away when you see this. It’s so important – not just for the label, but for music in general.’ We were like, ‘Wow, okay…’ When the video finished, there was applause – and also some tears.”

Quickly, Calderone agreed to make Keys part of a “360 plan,” where MTV, M2, and MTV.com featured her in saturation. He also claims that Keys was the first booking for the 2001 Video Music Awards, and she’s already taped a ‘Rock And Roll Hall of Fame’ concert for future broadcast.

“Everybody at MTV wanted to be a part of this story and help them break this,” he says. “We just went for it.”

Despite all her friends in high places, for the independent Keys, the greatest Svengali has always been herself. Despite her youth, she wrote and produced the majority of the songs on her debut, and played most of the instruments. And today, in the rehearsal studio, she’s definitely Queen Bee.

On the one hand, she oozes high youthful MTV superstar style: in her distressed designer jeans emblazoned with rhinestones, a midriff-revealing shirt that spells out “Alicat” in metal studs, bejweled Madonna-style belt buckle spelling out “Keys,” two-way pager beeping like a life support system, and enormous blue sunglasses hiding tired eyes, Keys skips around the studio, effortlessly chilled out, playfully singing the chorus to Lipps. Inc.’s disco anthem ‘Funkytown’ as she interacts with her various factions. As well, her speaking voice puts those who listen to her at ease; its husk suggests a preternaturally Zen, old-soul vibe, the words coming out in slow motion like rich molasses pouring out of a pot.

However, her professional demeanour exudes, to paraphrase Janet Jackson, control. On the rehearsal stage, standing amidst a phalanx of musicians and choreographers, Keys directs a group of dancers from Teens In Motion, a charity that counsels urban teens by giving them an outlet in dance; the young dancers are set to perform with her during her New York concerts. As the dancers spiral around, doing aggressive, African-influenced moves full of angular head swinging, clapping and floot thumping, Keys is utterly un-diva like – encouraging, warm, smiling.

This isn’t a democracy, though – it’s life in the key of Keys: she tells the dancers in no uncertain terms exactly when she wants the routines to begin, where she wants them to end, and where they need to be edited. Displaying such focus, it’s surprising that her record company even bothered to send her to “media training,” which is often recommended for nascent stars-in-the-making.

“I did, like, two sessions,” Keys says. “It didn’t work for me. [The media trainer] had some great suggestions though the few times I met her, like ‘Keep things private that you don’t want to tell. You don’t have to tell everything.’”

Then again, there are some things that Keys can’t hold back. When asked if it felt like sweet revenge against her former record company Columbia when her album went to number one, an enormous grin spontaneously erupts across Keys’ face.

“So sweet,” she whispers as if it’s the most sublime feeling ever. “I heard they aren’t allowed to play the album in the office. They gave me a baby grand piano: that’s the one thing I have that’s worth anything from Columbia. Well, I learned a lot of good lessons, too – like believing in what I do, no matter what people say.” (Even Davis gets into the Columbia roasting: when asked if it was expensive to get Alicia off Columbia – insiders put the number at $250,000 – Davis notes with a hearty laugh that “It was money well spent – for sure.”)

And when Keys discusses how the betrayals she’s experienced in her rise have burned her, her steely determination becomes abundantly clear.

“When I feel like I can’t trust the people around me, I get rid of them,” Keys says as her eyes narrow to slits and her voice takes on a surprising, don’t-fuck-with-me hardness that wasn’t there previously. “If someone fucks me over, they’re gone. One strike, you’re out.”

Keys’ independent streak, in fact, developed from her experiences as a biracial latchkey kid growing up in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Key’s mother, an Italian-American from Ohio, raised her daughter on her own after her African-American father left them soon after Alicia was born, supporting them both on a paralegal’s salary.

“It was just her and I, which was both tough and exciting,” Keys says. “There were definitely a lot of things to come to terms with: growing up, my father, my mother. But I felt like I was from a traditional family, because most families aren’t traditional any more.”

For Alicia, her non-nuclear family unit may have made her aware of the facts of life a bit too early – even if she was having fun.

“I’ve always hung out with older people: when I was 11, I had friends that were sixteen. That can’t be good!,” Keys says with a laugh. “I was often alone, which led me to be both responsible and irresponsible in a lot of senses. That was the basis of my childhood. If I was gonna sneak someone in the house, who was gonna know but me? And I was hitting clubs early – I definitely hit the Tunnel young, and Mecca we did once or twice. There’s nothing like the thrill of convincing somebody that you’re old enough to get in! But with my friends, it was about gassing the boys. We had a good time!”

Hinting at the naughtiness in her past clearly gives Keys glee: her eyes light up at every mention of her youthful rule breaking. Still, despite the rough and tumble nature of her environment, her mother instilled a discipline in her that pushed her to eventually become valedictorian of her high school (Professional Performing Arts, where Clare Danes was a classmate) and sent her to the Ivy League (like Lauryn Hill, Keys attended Columbia University for a short while until her music career overwhelmed her).

“My mom was serious,” Keys recalls. “Even though I didn’t have a father with me, cats would be scared to come to the house. My mom’s not the pushover type. She’s my best friend, my main supporter.”

While money was often tight, Alicia’s mom made sure that Alicia always had piano lessons, which began almost as soon as Alicia could walk. According to Keys, she’d loved music since she got her first ever record, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ by Kermit The Frog, yet it took until the ripe old age of four for her to decide on her career.

“I was auditioning for this kid’s production of The Wizard Of Oz, and I had to sing ‘Follow The Yellow Brick Road’,” she says. “That’s when I realised I could sing, and after that, I always sang. I was always a choir kind of girl, but not a church choir. I’m very spiritual but not very religious,”trilling a few bars of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” for emphasis.

By the time she was nine, Keys found herself in “little girl groups where I was always the youngest, the little Michael Jackson.” She soon found out, however, that the group dynamic isn’t ideal for self-expression.

“Groups are hard, especially when you’re young – people don’t come on time, everything else is always more important,” Keys says. “I was the taskmaster a little bit, yeah. Somebody always has to say what’s up. It was hard. A lot of us are still close friends. But the people we were working with, the management, were not good people. They didn’t give a damn if you could write, play, or had ideas. For them, it was just look pretty, sing and shut up.”

A determined edge creeps back into Keys’ voice as she adds, “I had that a lot coming up. The people’s opinions I value are the people that don’t give a damn that I have a pimple. If you do give a damn that I have a pimple, I ain’t gonna fuck with you.”

With solo success, however, Keys sees that it was no fluke her musical career began as Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz.

”Now I try to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in every situation,” she explains.

But when Prince starts calling to invite you to perform at his birthday party and rap stars blow up your two-way with unsolicited pages so frequently you’re considering changing the number, it’s clear you’re not in Kansas anymore.

The one difficulty that truly gnaws at Keys, in fact, is the tightrope tension between being famous and “keeping it real.” She still relishes talking like the ‘round-the-way Noo Yawk street kid she is (in her mouth, “better” is always “bett-ah”), and when asked what brand her sunglasses are, she’s embarassed by their overt ghetto-fab jigginess.

“They’re stupid Christian Dior,” she says. “No disrespect, but Christian Dior’s stuff breaks really easy, and that’s a bitch. Give me some five dollar shades off the corner – they hold up better! That’s what I usually rock.”

She’s almost self-consciously the anti-J. Lo., always making a point of how little she’s changed with the game of fame, always playing the underdog: when she needs to sit for an interview and all the chairs are taken, she plops down on the studio lobby’s cold linoleum floor rather than ask someone to move.

Still, fame brings its own challenges: it seems almost inevitable, for example, that Eminem will write a rap claiming that Keys gave him head, much in the same way he dissed Christina Aguilera.

“Everybody talks about something,” Keys says. “I’ve heard millions of rumours: I’m Clive’s illegitimate daughter, and of course that I’m gay, which is a fucking lie. If I was gay, I would say it, I really would, but I’m not, so I don’t. I know who I am. That doesn’t affect me.”

It’s maintaining that sense of self while not getting cut off on the yellow brick road is what ultimately drives Keys.

“People who get what they want continuously tend to take it for granted,” she explains, picking herself off the floor to hurry back to rehearsal. “I get what I want, but I don’t take it for granted.”