Ask most creative artists what got them started and they will tell you about one key moment in their childhood that triggered their decision to devote themselves to a particular art form, rather than, say, a career in accountancy. For a generation of British musicians, it was the experience of watching David Bowie perform Starman on Top of the Pops. For the 22-year-old American soul singer Alicia Keys, whose 2001 debut album, Songs in A Minor, sold nearly 10m copies, we have Homer to thank.

No, not Springfield’s animated, accident-prone paterfamilias: instead, Keys was pushed over the edge by the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newly enrolled at New York’s Columbia University and moonlighting in a recording studio, the exhausted singer was informed that, having just struggled through the poet’s epic (ie, long) account of the siege of Troy, she was now required to read the Odyssey.

“I couldn’t take it any more,” she laughs. “I was in the studio all night, then coming into school. I tried to push my classes back later, so I could get up about eight, do some homework, get on a train and be there by 12. So, when they said we had to do the Odyssey next, I just thought: I can’t do this. This is not going to work.”

At the time, Keys was a year into her first recording contract, and having a pretty horrid time of it. Her bank account might have been fattened by a big advance, but the New Yorker was being forced to sit back and listen as a succession of producers — at least one of whom, she hints, expected their collaboration to continue once recording was done for the day — smothered her songs with their own ideas.

“I had this strong feeling: if I keep working with these people, it’s all going to be twisted and warped and diluted. I would listen again to those songs and think: I hate it.”

Keys had begun composing and singing as a young girl, the only child of a white actress and a black flight attendant (her father walked out when she was two), growing up in Hell’s Kitchen back in those pre-zero-tolerance days when it was as grim as its name suggests. She learnt, she says, fast. “There was me and my mother. She was all I had. She was there as much as she could be, but a lot of times, she couldn’t be there. You definitely had to know how to handle yourself, to be able to manoeuvre very early on.”

When Songs in A Minor first zoomed up the charts, cynics looked at Keys’s background as a classically trained pianist and a top-of-the-class high-school student who graduated two years early, at her second record deal, with the music legend Clive Davis’s J label, and decided that she was too good to be true.

Critics heard A Minor’s clear referencing of great soul records of old and cried foul. She was beautiful, she produced and wrote all her material, and her album was selling millions. She had been signed by the man who discovered Whitney Houston, who used his contacts to secure her a slot on the career-launching Oprah Winfrey Show, ergo she must be packaged or manufactured.

Well, Keys is having the last laugh, and quite the biggest guffaw she’s likely to enjoy should come when her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, is released next month. Far from being the formulaic follow-up it could so easily have been, The Diary takes her songwriting back to basics, back to the classic early-1970s soul music that remains — Chopin and Beethoven aside — her first love. Moreover, the woman who, two days after 9/11, told a journalist, “I look at that flag and I’m not able to completely go there; I see lies in that flag”, is now setting such sentiments to music — although getting her to admit as much is not easy.

“When the smoke clears, what will be left of us?” she sings on one of the album’s key tracks, Wake Up. “I need my baby home, bring my baby back to me.” Until this point in the interview, topics had been batted back and forth. Already a veteran, Keys knows how to natter, how to give without giving away. At this point, she freezes, her usually wide, open eyes turning into tiny, enigmatic pins. Would it be accurate, I ask, to conclude that she is addressing current events in America — and in Iraq? There is an almighty pause.

“You’re absolutely not wrong,” she eventually says, then clams up. Later, she defends her reticence, explaining: “It’s definitely important to think before you speak, you don’t just want to blurt something out. What you say can be twisted.”

In the search for signs that — for all that Keys insists it hasn’t — the pressure has got to her, this exchange stands out as a pretty stark reminder of just how much is riding on the new album. But the proof is in the pudding, and it’s here that you really begin to see what she meant back in 2001, when, commenting on her label’s refusal to let her play a particular role in the video for her breakthrough single, Fallin’, she said: “Next time they ’ll do it my way.” Which is exactly what she does on The Diary.

On Streets of New York, she is joined by the rappers Nas and Rakim on a post-9/11 tour of both the clean and the mean streets of the city, to a backing that, in its mad mix of hip-hop, free jazz, soul and blues, is as ambitious as any music being made today, let alone music destined for the top of the charts. And her hoarse, stripped-bare performance on If I Ain’t Got You is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as soul’s finest female singers, its final, resounding piano note seeming to say: this is me, this is what I do, this is how I do it.

“I could hop on every bandwagon, I could constantly be chasing after every hit, but I don’t think I could feel proud of myself,” she says. “I really wish, in a perfect world, that the bullshit would just not exist. But I understand the game. I just hope that it will go down as a fantastic album, regardless of numbers.”

And she’s right. At the end of the day, that’s how the album will live or die: not for how many platinum discs it earns, nor for how many magazine covers it generates, but whether it is seen, years from now, as a record that still stands out from the crowd. She should lighten up: for it surely will be. Even at this early stage of her journey — or should that be odyssey? — Alicia Keys is staking her claim to greatness.





The Diary of Alicia Keys is released on December 1 on J/BMG