Alicia Keys: As I Am

Label: J Records, Sony/BMG
Sound/Style: Urban pop with classic soul influences

By Steve Morley

Young neo-soul artist Alicia Keys made an instantaneous impact with her 2001 debut Songs in A Minor, the first of three chart-topping releases. The pressure of her massive success drove Keys, a self-confessed workaholic, to move at a merciless pace. It paid off in nine Grammy awards and album sales in the millions, but her runaway work ethic―combined with mounting family issues that included the passing of her beloved grandmother―led the performer to stop and take stock. Her newest studio album, As I Am, finds Keys concentrating on her own life and occasionally sharing more penetrating personal insights than on her emotionally guarded previous records. While this is good news for fans hoping for a more intimate glimpse into the singer’s life, the approach leaves little room for the issues of gender and race that earned Keys respect as well as awards from the NAACP. She’s traded these subjects for matters of the heart, expressed unimaginatively over a sound that bows as much to modern hip-hop as to the vaunted classic soul influences of her early work. The result is competent but hardly envelope-pushing urban pop.

“Lesson Learned,” a duet with John Mayer, isn’t meaty enough to benefit from his high-profile appearance, while the lightly funky “Go Ahead” settles for simplistic lyrics that, though assertive, offer little in the way of emotional detail. (“Go ahead, go on and get up out of here/ Go ahead baby/ You knew you was wrong/ You knew all along/ Must be crazy.”)

Keys’ performance sometimes overcomes the limitations of her material, though. She bounds past the clichés scattered throughout “The Thing About Love” with a passionate and throaty delivery that very nearly sacrifices vocal control for sheer emotion.

As she does there, Keys occasionally sings with an abandon that infuses certain tracks with power, while some simply sound reckless. The unsteady intonation that mars tracks like “No One” proves that she isn’t guilty of employing the digital pitch correction so rampant in the industry, but it’s unusual to hear a singer of her caliber missing the mark.

Keys is most engaging when she reveals elements of her inner landscape, as she does on “Superwoman.” The track displays the ironic contrast between her strength, which she uses in part to serve as an empowering role model for women, and the weariness and alienation that result from choosing to wear such heavy armor. (“Even when I'm a mess/ I still put on a vest/ With an ‘S’ on my chest/ Oh yes, I'm a Superwoman/ This is for all the mothers fighting/ For better days to come…”)

On “Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” a standout cut featuring the multi-talented Keys playing cascading keyboard lines, the recent loss of her grandmother casts a telling shadow of mortality on present-day relationships. (“I don't wanna forget the present is a gift/ And I don't wanna take for granted the time you may have here with me/ 'Cause Lord only knows another day is not really guaranteed.”)

Even if this disc is the closest thing to a misstep in her short but stellar career, the honesty, passion and musicality Keys invests in As I Am still make it tempting to look forward to what she’s yet to become.

Audio Clips

"Go Ahead"

"Superwoman"

"No One"

"Like You'll Never See Me Again"