If record moguls had their way, who knows what manufactured pop creation Alicia Keys would be today?

Thank goodness the girl had the strength to speak her mind.

In 1997, the then-16-year-old piano prodigy had just left high school, had a million dollars placed in her hands and a huge decision to make.
At the same time two Columbias were calling her name: the prestigious New York university had offered her a scholarship and the major record label had signed her as an artist.

All Columbia Records wanted her to do was become a “piano-playing Britney Spears”.

It seemed a hugely profitable idea to them and a depressing frustration for Keys.

She walked out of the deal.

Today as Mrs Federline’s record sales spiral down the drain, Keys continues to soar.

Her debut album Songs In A Minor entered America’s Billboard charts at No. 1, won five Grammies and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and she has been described by critics as the “saviour of soul”.

Somewhere in Manhattan a record executive is weeping into his mocha-frappe-latte.

“Oh man, that was hell,” Keys says of her experience with Columbia Records.

“There’s nothing worse than not being allowed to be yourself.

“You know it had taken me so long to find that place where I felt comfortable in my own creative skin and then have somebody tell you ‘that sounds bad’ or ‘that’s horrible, it’ll never work’ – it shatters your confidence, it’s a big blow.

“In a lot of ways, being so young at the time, you don’t know what’s going to work and for somebody who allegedly has experience and has done so many things with so many big names, to say ‘it sounds horrible, you better go back to the lab’, after I’d been working for years on it, well it was tough. But I was lucky in that I was able to be tougher than them.”

This strength, she says, stems from her childhood. Her black father walked out, leaving her white mother struggling to pay the bills and raise a child.

Living in a one-room flat in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, Alicia Augello Cook (she adopted the surname Keys) would practise classical piano, while outside her window pimps, hookers and addicts worked the footpath.

On Sunday mornings she would wake to the sounds of her mother’s favourite musicians Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday playing on their little stereo.

Somehow the talented beauty entwined these worlds to create a hybrid of classical piano mixed with blues, soul and hip-hop.

She seems to embody blues songstress Nina Simone alongside hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur, this writer suggests.

“I really, really, really like that. That sums up exactly how I feel,” Keys responds.

“I’ve heard so many things I’ve connected with, but I like that description best: Nina Simone meets Tupac – that sums me up exactly.”

The 23-year-old singer/songwriter is now in the midst of a worldwide tour which includes Brisbane this month.

Her second album The Diary Of Alicia Keys was greeted with critical acclaim, she is about to release a novel and Halle Berry has approached her to star in a biopic of the 1930s mixed-race piano prodigy Phillipa Schuyler.

Even the record execs who laughed at her original compositions are now desperately craving a piece of Keys.

“I was on the phone to somebody the other day and they were near the president of the record company at the time and he gets on the phone and he was, like, ‘Hey Alicia! How you doing? Long time! Listen, we really should talk. We should talk about doing some things together.’

“And I’m like ‘Ah-huh. I’m sure we’ll talk,’ and it just took everything in me to, well, you know, you have to let it go after a certain point.

But I realised at that moment it wasn’t even that important to be upset at him, because everything he did is the reason why I am where I am, so I should thank him really.

“I should thank him for not being hip to the game . . . that allowed me to fly.”

Thx 2 Giu