At 21, Alicia Keys was already a five-time Grammy Award winner. But in a new interview with InStyle, the singer shared that her early years in the industry weren’t all that glamorous.
“I swear, I wouldn’t go back to being 20 if somebody paid me,” Keys told InStyle, appearing as the cover star of the magazine’s July issue.
“It was literally the worst time ever. I wanted to fit in so desperately. I was so blind, so dependent on everybody else’s opinions, so uncomfortable, so unclear,” she said.
The singer, now 39, revealed that in 2006, she suffered from an emotional meltdown that changed her life.
Taking a break from her public engagements, Keys traveled to Egypt for two weeks on her own, attended a meditation and yoga retreat in Los Angeles and started a no-makeup movement to chip away at the armor Keys said she “was stuck behind.”
Though the coronavirus pandemic delayed the May 2020 release of her seventh studio album, ALICIA, Keys spoke about some of her earlier music. Specifically, she shared that her 2002 single, ‘A Woman’s Worth’ and her 2012 single, ‘Girl On Fire,’ were written in part to convince herself of the messages of empowerment she was trying to impress upon her fans.
“There hasn’t been one that I wrote because I actually believed it at the time. I needed to pull myself out of a rut or a place of confusion,” she said.
Keys is married to rapper and producer Swizz Beatz and they have two children together. While she shared that she’s spending much of quarantine in sweatpants, baking cookies and enjoying family time, Keys offered some parting words of advice (the interview took place before the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests).
“To me, the most important thing we can do right now is take a second to see and appreciate each other as we are,” Keys said.
“I really believe that we are it - we are what we’re waiting for, what we’re looking for. The way we raise our kids, the way we choose to be with each other, the way we face the world - that is how things will start to shift.”
