AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, ALICIA KEYS IS FINALLY FINDING HER VOICE.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Alicia Keys and her husband, Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, are wearing matching pants. His: expertly tailored and trim, skimming his sneakers just so. Hers: a sexy waxed denim that hugs her in all the right places.
Both are the color of a well-made cappuccino. They’ve agreed to be interviewed together over dinner, a double date of sorts. It’s one of those novel ideas cooked up by magazine editors, but Keys, who seems more open now than she’s ever been, was keen to participate. And what better way to convey closeness than with his-and-her trousers.
But spend a couple of hours with them drinking cocktails that taste like tropical fruit juice, and it’s clear they don’t need color-coordinated outfits to get the point across. He’ll tug at the sleeve of her coat to help her shimmy out of it. Her hand will rest sweetly on his thigh. They’ll talk about their partnership in a way that says, “We want the whole world to have what we have,” and they’ll do it by telling you about the moment when they knew they were soul mates.
“It was the craziest thing,” says Dean, leaning forward in his chair. “We had a work lunch with some people, and I get home and look in the back pocket—"
"My credit card was in his pocket,” Keys finishes the story, eyes wide. “Why was my credit card in his pocket?”
One explanation might be that he’d grabbed it by accident when they split the check, but that would be too prosaic. They saw the credit card debacle as a sign, the first of many. Well, second, if you count the time, 14 years ago, when they first met and Dean tried unsuccessfully to get her number from his friend. “It wasn’t our time yet,” he says with a smile.
Maybe it’s the swanky lighting, the buzz from the booze or simply the glow thattends to bounce off of famous people, but now definitely seems to be their time. And hers, especially. At 31, Keys is among the best-selling recording artists of all time. She’s released five albums, won 14 Grammys and sold more than 30 million albums worldwide. She’s now working on her sixth album, and yet she appears relaxed, approachable, easy-breezy.
Of course, she’s sort of always seemed that way, even all the way back in 2001, when she was a new artist with plenty of Harlem swag (Keys’ roots are from Hell’s Kitchen, N.Y.) promoting her first album, Songs in A Minor. But let her tell it and this is the first time in her life when she feels comfortable in her own skin. It’s the pay off, she says, for making difficult choices, personally and professionally.
“Let’s just say I’ve been very uncomfortable,” she’d said a few days earlier, curled up on a squishy red sofa in a recording studio. “I’ve been brave enough to be uncomfortable.”
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