2-just before the singer’s death and a month before 9/11.
Songs in A Minor spent a third week atop the Billboard charts in the same week that Aaliyah’s self-titled album bowed at No. She sang of profound love and desire, emotional and career stability. Then came Keys with her self-produced, Chopin-inspired compositions about self-worth, survival, and practical pursuits of happiness. Britney Spears and JC Chasez’s boy band were on their third albums, and Usher was gaining momentum for 8701, about to crush pop music off rock-hard abs alone. Songs in A Minor arrived amid the birth of iTunes and the sensual empowerment of Destiny’s Child. 1 album and Rolling Stone had crowned her “The Next Queen of Soul.” By March 2002, she’d gone five-times platinum and won five Grammys, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for her No.
Keys left Columbia in early 1999 to sign with Clive Davis at Arista Records and later his new label, J Records, where she could pilot her own vision. The label was, of course, laughably wrong. Columbia execs told her it sounded like one long demo. Keys found the recording process crushing and chose instead to partner with producer Kerry “Krucial” Brothers to create a dexterous blend of classical music and soul that merged young-adult melodrama with Beethoven. The label had already brought in big-name producers to strip away the retro-soul sound that separated artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Keys from the stream of sex-driven R&B in the late-’90s. “They wanted me, the tomboy from Hell’s Kitchen, to become the next teen pop idol,” Keys wrote in her memoir.
0 kommentar(er)
