Alicia Keys

There are certain things we come into this world having to defeat.

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

We think – or maybe we’re shown – that the only way to express ourselves is through that very sexy energy. I think there’s more than that which shows our power. For me, I sometimes feel the most sexy when I’m totally covered head to toe.

Everything I do stems from something personal, not just because it will look good on paper or be a tax write-off.

I feel like it’s by design that I’m raising boys, like there’s a reason. I don’t like my sons watching Snow White. It’s totally misogynistic

I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

Some twenty years ago, during the course of a memorable evening at the Stravinskys’ home in Los Angeles, the venerable maestro turned to me and said in no uncertain terms: ‘My dear, you should conduct your own music. All composers should conduct their own music!

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.