Alicia Keys got the spark for the title track of her new album at a very meta-moment while reading about herself. "It came from this interview that I did, and the woman wrote something like, 'She's like a girl on fire'," says Keys in her New York studio. "And I was like, I love that. And I remember thinking, I'm writing a song called Girl on Fire, for sure."
The next question was, as she put it: what does a song called Girl on Fire sound like?
It might seem an obvious thing to consider, but figuring out the sounds that complement your ideas is one of the most important decisions in music. In the wake of her previous album, 2009's The Element of Freedom, which made its debut at No 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and failed to make No 1, a first for Keys, and given the fact that she was a new mother, she decided to take it slowly while working on new material, listening to some of the songs that inspire her. "I'd come in and listen to music," she says. "I was listening to some Frank Ocean, definitely some old stuff, like Nina Simone. Just whatever I thought on the day an easy vibe, not to put too much pressure on it. And then maybe I had a rough idea, maybe something I'd started, or I'd write a little bit, or if I had an idea, I'd put the idea down. Maybe it was just piano and I'd sing some vocals for it; just see if I liked it."
One day, she was in the studio with two collaborators, the producers Jeff Bhasker and Salaam Remi, and she brought up the Girl on Fire concept. Together, they tried different chords and melodies, but "they just didn't spark anything".
Then Remi, who worked on hits by the Fugees and Amy Winehouse, moved to the computer. "He started going through his sample library and all these different crazy drums. And there were these loud, obnoxious, just destructive drums, and I was like, yeah! A girl on fire is loud and obnoxious and destructive and totally unrelenting and she's free, you know what I mean?" She'd found her sound; now she could start her song. "That's what a girl on fire sounds like."
For Keys, the search for songs started way back when she was seven, living with her mother in a tiny apartment on the West Side of Manhattan and singing I Wanna Dance With Somebody in the mirror. When friends of the family were giving away a piano it wasn't much, just an upright from the 30s they asked Keys's mum if she'd like to have it. She took it and Alicia started to play.
"When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favourite song and I'd take the chords and twist them around," she said. "I'd learn the chords and then play them backwards. That was my first experimenting with writing a song."
More than 20 years and five albums later, her method isn't all that different. You can see it even when Keys is just warming up at the piano in her studio, a neat and airy space that houses several vintage keyboards and offers expansive views over New York. She still gets ready to perform by moving through slow progressions and mutations of the chords, feeling her way toward the song.
The Girl on Fire lyrics are characteristically Keys, evocative but unspecific. Girl on Fire speaks to Keys's life, which has changed recently with marriage and a new son, Egypt. In her lyrics, her aim is to be personal while stopping shy of confessional, a technique she learned from listening to Marvin Gaye. "As a lyricist, you love to hear other great lyrics or other great concepts," she told me. "I really appreciate Frank Ocean's lyrical style, I appreciate the way that he can kind of draw you into this personal space, but it's still lyrical. It's almost poetic, in a way, but it's very personal at the same time."
On a recent day at her studio, she kicked into a rendition of the finished song: "She's just a girl and she's on fire: hotter than a fantasy, lonely like a highway." Like Keys's past work, the new material has a recognisable backbone of classic soul and R&B. And the simmering emotions of songs such as the quiet, longing ballad 101 have their origins in lots of listens to Prince's smouldering Beautiful Ones and Stevie Wonder's moody They Won't Go When I Go.
"I wouldn't listen to it for lyric inspiration," she said of the Wonder track, "but it's more for the tone, for the sound of the vocal, for the way the piano feels and how he's delivering it. It's dark and vulnerable but still beautiful and inspiring."
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