Downstairs, Myleene Klass is sashaying between cables and curtains, dressed in a silver gown with a plunging neckline. Nicola, from Girls Aloud, totters through an open-plan coffee shop, carrying her toy dog, Elvis. Down the corridor, Chaka Khan’s people are having a strop because someone has put pitta bread in her dressing room, not tortilla wraps. But the moment that the combination lock clicks shut on Alicia Keys’s dressing room door, the tiaras and tantrums are replaced with tranquillity.

Keys, the 27-year-old New York singer, songwriter, producer and actress best known for the R&B mega-hit You Don’t Know My Name (somewhat counterintuitive for a multi-platinum-selling artist) is here for the recording of last weekend’s ITV special, Saturday Night Divas.

Céline Dion and Jennifer Lopez have already filmed their spots. “Miss Chaka”, as Keys calls her friend, will soon sing I’m Every Woman for approximately the 18,000th time. Keys’s own performance may use no fewer than three pianos but it comes as something of a surprise, given the title of the show, that there is nothing affected about her. Her entourage is low-profile; a security guard keeps watch outside whatever room she is in, and as we talk, an assistant quietly makes her a cup of herbal tea. She is chatty, relaxed and switched-on, keen to engage in discussions about her music, occasionally turning the tables and asking her questioner’s opinion on topics that interest her.

Her new album, As I Am, is her most commercial record so far. Without abandoning the flair for hip-hop orchestration heard in her work with Nas, Timbaland and Kanye West, the record is laden with the sort of emotive epics that will sit easily on all those I am Woman: Hear Me Roar compilations. Three of them – Sure Looks Good to Me, Superwoman and The Thing about Love – were actually co-written with the queen of the power ballad, Linda Perry.

It is a record that will put Keys into the collections of people who usually listen only to Dido or Barbra Streisand, yet will do so without alienating the diehards. Among them is a special fan. “There’s nothing about that girl I don’t like,” Bob Dylan said of Keys when asked by Rolling Stone why he had name-checked her on his Modern Times album.

“It surprised me, but I loved it,” Keys says of the tribute. She still hasn’t met Dylan, so has not had a chance to find out what she did that caught his eye, but she will allow that “We are kindred spirits. He writes from the heart, he writes from the soul – so do I.” A return of the compliment is being considered, but isn’t imminent. “I’m trying to think of a comeback line for one of my next songs,” she says with a smile, “but ‘Dylan’ is not very easily rhymeable.”

Keys’s two previous studio albums – in 2001 Songs in A Minor (11 million sales) and The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003, eight million sales), plus an Unpluggedlive album – have laid the foundations for a career that may yet emulate the legends that [[ her music echoes: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder (a friend). and Prince (they chat from time to time).

Born Alicia Augello Cook, Keys was raised in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, by her mother and her paternal grandmother. Her father is a part of her life today, “but not so much when I was growing up”.

As I Amreflects a tough time in her life. When her grandmother was found to be terminally ill last year, Keys felt the same need to be there for her as a child would feel towards a dying parent. Struggling to write a new album and juggling offers for acting roles (she starred as an assassin in Smokin’ Aces, and opposite Scarlett Johansson in The Nanny Diaries), she put everything on hold.

“I needed a break,” she says. “I was overcooked – take me out of the oven! But this situation [her grandmother’s illness] meant that break couldn’t happen. I thought coming home would bring a sense of peace or ease, but it became even more difficult than I ever imagined. But it was also rewarding and comforting to be able to return the time and the love and the care and the tenderness and the gentleness and the understanding to a woman who had done that for me my whole life.”

Keys eventually took a short holiday last September in Egypt. “I sailed down the Nile, slept underneath the stars, and I heard them start praying at 4am,” she says. “I went inside the Great Pyramid and climbed to the top. The guy I was with got them to hold the other people back so I could be alone just for a minute, and I sang – I don’t know what, just whatever came into my head – and it sounded so beautiful.

“I was floored by the pyramids, just thinking about the way someone’s mind conjured them up,” she enthuses. “I was like, ‘Man, there’s nothing now that anybody can tell me! Anything I wanna do, I can do it: this shows me right here.’ ” It was a pivotal moment. Keys returned to New York invigorated. Ditching the tracks she had been working on – “I was in such the wrong space. I had some good ideas, but they weren’t right” – she started again. Before, she had made the albums she had wanted to make but was aware of how they might be received and allowed that to affect the outcome. Not this time.

“My whole album is summed up by the last song, Sure Looks Good to Me,” she says, looking me straight in the eye: “Life’s too short to waste one day/ I’m gonna risk it all – the freedom to fall/ Sure looks good to me.’ ” Baring her emotions is a relatively new thing for Keys – at least two songs refer to her grandmother’s death – as she usually keeps an iron grip on her private life. In the past she has refused to divulge her boyfriend’s name (it is widely speculated to be Kerry “Krucial” Brothers, a partner in her music production company Krucial Keys) and hashad to face down speculation that she is gay.

It’s obvious that she’s happiest discussing the creative process.“I write the song and there it is, in all its raw emotion,” she explains. “I’ll start with a small number of instruments, put it down, sing it, feel it, capture the moment that I’m talkin’ about, and, poof! It’s right there. Then, as time goes on, I’m able to fine-tune it and add to it and make it better, until it’s perfect.”

Does she have trouble letting go? “There’s a part of what I’m doing, a part of my personal journey, that’s about letting go,” she admits. “For a long time I felt such a grave responsibility for so many things, and so many people that I love and care about. But I can’t change anybody else’s life: their life is their life. Coming to recognise that gives me a better sense of perspective.

“One of my best qualities, and one of my worst qualities, is kindness,” says Keys, who is an accomplished charity worker. “I’m very, very super-kind, super-caring, wanting to make everybody happy. That’s my problem – wanting to make every... body... happy. It’s impossible.”

This time, the only person Alicia Keys has tried to please is herself: and it may turn out to be this unconventional diva’s most popular decision yet.

As I Am is released by J Records/SonyBMG on Nov 19. A single, No One, is out on Monday

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