The Princess of Queens

By Josh Tyrangiel

There is a silent plague that kills more music careers than drug overdoses, plane crashes and guest appearances on American Dreams combined. It's called second-album syndrome, and it is a cruel and unpredictable assassin. Paula Cole, the promising pop-folk bohemian of the late '90s, got seven Grammy nominations for her major-label debut, then inexplicably decided to go disco. Search parties have all but given up hope of finding her. Second-album syndrome usually works quickly, but it can also behave like a slow, dignity-robbing virus. Britney Spears had a choice when putting together her second album--establish a pattern of artistic evolution or repeat the formula of her initial titillating success. She called that second album Oops! ... I Did It Again, and she now clings to relevance by an ever loosening bra strap.

Alicia Keys, who releases her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, on Dec. 2, understandably does not want to hear any of this. "People have this thing about the second album," says Keys, "like it's supposed to be scary and full of omens, like we must all collapse and be frightened now. And for me, everything is so much better on this album. My first album, I felt good about it, but I didn't know what I was doing. That's scary. It's one thing to sit in front of a piano and write songs. It's a whole other thing to put a record together."

Only now are people beginning to notice that Keys' 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor, wasn't actually a complete record. A Minor won five Grammys and sold 6 million copies, but it was a much better media event than an album. Most of the excitement was over one song, Fallin', a little miracle of a soul ballad that merged the grooves of Mary J. Blige with the grieving of Carole King. Fallin' is one of the best love songs of the past decade. To dislike it is to dislike pop music. But the strength of Fallin', combined with the compelling and oft repeated details of Keys' bio--she was raised by a single mom in one of Manhattan's rougher neighborhoods and received "classical training" on the piano--obscured the fact that most of A Minor was pretty average.

What was extraordinary was how Keys, 22, handled herself following the publicity maelstrom. After her Grammy-night triumph--she missed out on Album of the Year but got a bouquet from fellow Album losers U2 with a card that said, "We're Fallin' for U2"; "It was very cute," says Keys--she went home and splurged on a dream apartment in Queens. If you are unfamiliar with the social inferences of New York City geography, a celebrity buying a dream home in Queens is like an heiress shopping for a necklace at Zales. "It's a cool part of Queens," Keys says without a hint of defensiveness. "There's a mall really close by. A good mall."

The choice of Queens as opposed to SoHo or South Beach is defining. "I'm very--almost insanely--passionate about remaining a connected, boring, human person," says Keys. "It's amazing how fast you can be transported out of the normal world if you're not conscious of it or if you don't care. I noticed that immediately, and it scared the s___ out of me." Keys has had a few memorable brushes with fame--she was summoned to Paisley Park to jam with Prince--but mostly, she says, "people are disappointed with my glamour quotient. Just today someone was like, 'You know, Madonna and Britney did the kiss. Do you feel like you have to do something like that when you come back out?' And I'm just like, 'Shut up.' I'm not scared of what I am or what I do. I let the music speak, and I feel good with that."

It's not merely that Keys' humility stands out against the Maxim-style vamping of her peers. She really is a throwback. Keys wrote her first song in 1995 after her grandfather died but says she didn't understand what songwriting was about until a few years later when a friend gave her a yellowing cassette of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. "That was the best period ever in music," she says. "I probably have romanticized it, but it just seems noble to me. People weren't out chasing hits. They were writing songs about what they felt. They were experimenting and working together. There was a community. Listen to songs of that time, and you can feel the passion. It gives me chills."

Keys wishes she had a community of like-minded contemporaries. She's close to neo-soul singer Angie Stone and admires OutKast and Norah Jones ("I've never met her, but I get the feeling that she's really unimpressed with the world of music entertainment," Keys says. "I feel like when she gets onstage she wonders what everyone's doing there"). But mostly Keys works alone. The dream apartment has a studio downstairs where she can write, record and produce songs all by herself whenever the mood strikes her. "My life is pretty cool. I get up when I want, stay in bed, maybe write in my journal, read a little poetry," she says. "Then I go make music."

On The Diary of Alicia Keys she has made half a great record. The first six songs are models of how to make nostalgic music that is not anti-present. You Don't Know My Name is six minutes of sprawling midtempo lightness that revives that '70s staple, the spoken interlude, without a moment's embarrassment or doubt; Karma uses fraught bursts of strings over a stuttering beat to create great pop tension; while If I Was Your Woman sounds like the product of a one-night stand between Gladys Knight (who made a hit of If I Were Your Woman) and the Notorious B.I.G. The second half of Diary sags, but it's obvious that there will be a third, fourth and fifth Alicia Keys album and that those albums will be worth hearing.

Meanwhile, Keys is working her songbook. While some performers get tired of playing their hits, Keys continues to look forward to the moment in every show when she gets to dust off Fallin'. "I drag it around like a damn badge of honor. So many people told me that that song in particular would never work. 'It's too urban, it's too black, it'll never cross over.' The fact that it was successful told me one thing: Nobody knows anything," she says. "A lot of those people who doubted are out of jobs now," she adds. Keys will be keeping hers.