Alicia Keys Reflects On How Life Experiences Gave Her Permission To Be 'More Myself'
Music artist Alicia Keys, a 15-time Grammy winner, has a new self-titled album coming out — her seventh.
She also has written a forthcoming book, More Myself, that she prefers to call a "journey" rather than a memoir.
Keys spoke to NPR in February — an interview being aired for the first time now — about her latest projects.
Her book explores her arrival into adulthood while in the spotlight, and how she learned to be herself — and that it was OK to be herself.
There are "stereotypes that surround us and follow us everywhere we go. ... I've been thinking so much about who I am, and what makes me that way, and how can I stay connected to the truth of that, even in a really, really noisy world," she told NPR.
Interview highlights
On celebrating ordinary people
We are all ordinary and extraordinary. I've never looked at myself as different from anybody else ever. Not one day in my life. Not today. Not yesterday. I've always been really connected with people — and I've always been really connected with the working man and woman, because, you know, my mother and myself are, I mean, we are absolutely that person who has defied the odds. My mother raised me as a single mother. And, you know, she had a dream, just like many people, to go move from Toledo to New York and kind of pursue her dreams and her passion, which is acting.
And so there has always been this situation where we probably shouldn't have made it into or out of many things. And so, I've always been quite, quite humbled by the experience that I am able to experience, currently, and also before I was ever well-known or anything like that. And I think that ... for a long
