Song Lyric Sunday – Alicia Keys

This week, for Song Lyric Sunday, we are back at the Grammys. Host Jim Adams has asked us to pick a song from a Best New Artist Winner. One of my favorite artists who won this award in 2005 is Alicia Keys. I have featured her several times on SLS in recent years but I have not picked this song before. It is ‘If I Ain’t Got You’

The Song

The song was inspired by the tragic loss of 22-year-old R&B singer Aaliyah who died in a plane crash in The Bahamas on August 25, 2001. Keys later recalled: “The song idea came together right after Aaliyah passed away. It was such a sad time and no one wanted to believe it. It just made everything crystal clear to me – what matters, and what doesn’t.”

Performers on American Idol, The Voice and other such TV music talent shows have covered the song on countless occasions. Keys reflected to Entertainment Weekly in 2012: ”I have heard a lot of people cover this song. I think that’s actually the biggest compliment for a writer and for an artist, but especially for a writer. It showcases a big range and a powerful emotion, and I never think about it until it’s time to be on tour, and then I’m like, ‘S—! What did I do?’ [Laughs] You gotta make it through two hours, and I’m not lip-synching, so it’s serious.”

Keys won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for this song at the 2005 Grammy Awards.

This song inspired UK athlete Kelly Holmes to triumph in the 2004 Olympic Women’s 800 and 1500 metres. She explained: “There are lyrics about diamonds and things meaning everything to people, but that song is about my gold medal because if I haven’t got that, everything else means nothing.”

Alicia Keys wrote the song on a plane right after she’d heard the news of Aaliyah’s passing. She recalled in an online-exclusive clip from The Voice: “I think being on a plane and knowing she passed away after a plane crash, there was just this sentiment of being present in the moment and really nothing else mattering but those that you love. I think that feeling was really present in my life at that time and really right in my face.”

Keys came up with the lyrics and music straight away, but landing on a finished version took her a lot longer. “I wrote it really quickly, but in order to produce it the way that you hear it, it took forever,” she said. “Nothing would come out right. Every version that I did, every arrangement that I did was just wrong. It was such a labor of love.”

When Christina Aguilera was working on her Stripped album, she asked Alicia Keys to write something for her. Keys almost offered Aguilera “If I Ain’t Got You” before deciding to keep it for herself. She ended up giving her the track “Impossible.”
The Diane Martel-directed video features a cameo by Wu-Tang Clan rapper and actor Method Man as Keys’ on-screen boyfriend.

Alicia Keys released an orchestral version of “If I Ain’t Got You” with an orchestra featuring 74 women of color on May 3, 2023. It is led by South Africa’s first Black female conductor, Ofentse Pitse.

The song’s release coincided with The Vitamin String Quartet also covering “If I Ain’t Got You” for the Netflix series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.

Keys sang “If I Ain’t Got You” at halftime of the 2024 Super Bowl between the 49ers and Chiefs, won by the Chiefs in overtime. She was the first surprise guest on the show, which was headlined by Usher. After a few lines, Usher joined her, and they segued into “My Boo,” their duet from 2004.

The Artist

Alicia Keys was born January 25, 1981. Her mother is Italian and her father is black. They grew up in a poor section of New York City. Her birth name is Alicia Augello-Cook. She graduated as valedictorian from the Professional Performing Arts School in New York City when she was 16.

Columbia Records signed her out of high school, but refused to release the songs she wrote. Four years later, industry legend Clive Davis, who had signed Santana, Whitney Houston and Janis Joplin, signed her to his J Records and released her first album, Songs In A Minor, which went to #1.

Many people found out about her when she made appearances on Oprah and Jay Leno’s shows in 2001. Clive Davis wrote a personal letter to Oprah which helped get her on.

Keys learned classical piano through rigorous training using the Suzuki Method. She wanted to quit when she was 11, but her mom wouldn’t let her.

“I was at the piano while everybody was outside playing,” she told NPR. “It unlocked the ability to be able to write my own music and put my own chords and things I heard in my own head the different lyrics that I felt. And I never, ever had to wait for anybody to write something for me.”

She writes and produces her own songs, which set her apart from the many purveyors of dance-pop that were popular when she came on the scene in 2001.

She is married the record producer, DJ, rapper and painter Swizz Beatz (real name Kasseem Daoud Dean). They have 2 sons.

Keys made her television debut at the age of four, guesting on the Cosby Show in a cameo role as a sleepover friend of daughter Rudy Huxtable.

Alicia Keys’ first professional recording was a song titled “Dah Dee Dah (Sexy Thing).” It appeared on the soundtrack to the 1997 film, Men in Black, along with a track by another then unknown R&B act called Destiny’s Child.

Keys started songwriting at the age of 7 after friends of her mom gave away to them their 1930s upright piano. “When I was first learning songs, I’d have a favorite song and I’d take the chords and twist them around,” Keys recalled to The Observer. “I’d learn the chords and then play them backwards. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.”

Alicia Keys told Fact Magazine in 2016 that she is raising her kids in the same New York city neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen where she grew up, and they are taking piano lessons at the same school where she learned to play. “It’s kind of crazy every time I walk in,” she said. “On one hand it’s a community and I feel very protected. On the other, I feel like I’m trapped in the Twilight Zone, all those memories.”

She appeared on the TV drama Empire for two episodes in 2015, playing a pop singer named Skye Summers.

Courtesy of Songfacts

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