Keys performing earlier this month: Her new album features many clumsy riffs on the songs of others.Stephen Chernin
The Element of Freedom
- Alicia Keys
- Sony
'Stand strong and you will go on," sings Alicia Keys. "Cherish every day." Sounds like a Hallmark card, but we should probably all cherish every day and stand strong.
I have a harder time getting behind another line from Keys's new album: "If you have to walk a million miles, I'll wait a million days to see your smile." The trouble with that line isn't that it's over the top, even by R&B standards of devotion, but that it's a clumsy rip-off of My Mammy .
Keys has made a big fuss about how free she felt while making this record. I hear a lot of freedom in her voice, which sounds as rich and flexible as ever, and which she's not afraid to push for expressive reasons. But in her material, she's shackled to clichés of every kind, and to the notion that if you have a smart enough producer, you can overcome any weakness in songwriting.
The disc starts boldly with Love Is Blind , a big spacious track that sounds like she's fixing to sing about much more than love (though it turns out she's not); and ends the same way, with a fully sung version of Empire State of Mind , currently all over the radio as a rap single by Jay-Z. Love Is My Disease shows Keys is willing to drop the pretty sound for the true sound, and the reggae bump in the chorus comes at a point (halfway through the disc) when your ear is desperate for surprises.
Other tunes remind you of better tunes, such as the Smokey Robinson classic from which Keys borrows a keyboard trigger in How It Feels To Fly . Put It In A Love Song , a duet with Beyoncé, is a good punchy number that might sound even better if it didn't feel like a prequel to Beyoncé's hit, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) . This Bed feels like a Prince number that Prince declined to use.
Other songs are just dull, though Keys's producers have done their best to shine them up, using drum machines and such to put an edge on Keys's piano-bar playing and R&B-style balladry. Maybe next time she should exercise her freedom to hire some first-class songwriting partners.
Alicia Keys plays Scotiabank Place in Ottawa on March 1, John Labatt Centre in London on March 8 and Toronto's Air Canada Centre on March 10.