The Awakening of Alicia Keys: Her Journey from Jeans and Tims to skirts and heels and into Stella’s pants

by Toure

Alicia Keys is homesick. She’s on a bus with Italy behind her and Norway ahead. She has been getting on and off this bus for the past four months, performing around Europe and in the Middle East. She stopped at the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival and fell in love with Switzerland. “It’s got a really incredible vibe,”she says into a cell phone, her voice deep and smoky like Kathleen Turner from the block. “The way the mountains and the water are right there, it looks so picturesque,” she purrs. “It feels like your’re standing in a painting.” She tries to pick up local music in each country she visits, searching for new artists to learn from.”In Dubai I love the singing style because its kind of like flamenco. But it’s also Native American.It’s ill. Really, really dope.” While many of her contemporaries live for the recording studio, Keys 23. says the center of her musical life is the stage, and is hows in her incediary performances. Though she sits at a piano, it is the way she sits, sthe way she moves, comnbined with the high drama of the snatches of classical music she throws in and the way her graceful fingers dance about the keyboard and the way her tight, audacious cornrows, hug the curves of her head. There is no question:All eyes are on her.

Her world tour has been going on for a while so she has been living out of a suitcase for four months straight. “I’m usually not the homesick type,” she says. “When I was younger and starting out, I remember feeling really badly homesick. But when I got the feel for things and got engrossed in what I was doing. I never felt homesick. But this time I do.” Her mother is one of her closest friends and confidantes and often traveles with Keys, but Mom’s not on the road with her this time. Is that what’s making her homesick? “Next question,” she says.

In person, Keys gives off a predatory sexuality. She’s tomboyish in walk and the way she talks which probably comes from growing up in New York, first in Hell’s Kitchen and thenin Harlem,. where she lives-but she is gradually becoming more girlie. “I’m venturing way more into skirts and dresses now,” she says “At one time I was like, ‘If it’s not pants,I’m not wearing it.” And there were the Tims time in my life. If it wasn’t Tims, please. Now I love heels. I always wear heels. I don’t feel comfortable if I;m not wearing heels. She even has a favorite shoe desginer Guiseppe Zanotti, and her designers are Tufi Duek, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Gucci. “I never thought I would like Gucci, because it was a girlie poshy kind of designer,” she says. “So I was always rebellious against it.

Source: Glamour Magazine (Fashion Rocks special edition)

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