Alicia Keys: New Album Will Focus On Empowering Women

Alicia Keys has gone through marriage and motherhood, and now the artist is planning an album that will reflect the changes in her life.

Keys is hard at work on her next album, which she says will be filled with themes of empowering women.

“This time it’s more about what we’re going through as human beings,” Keys said.

Keys added, “We all experience similar things. I find that the world puts us in these boxes where we’re only allowed to be one way — like, ‘to succeed as a career woman, you need to do it this way,’ or ‘to be a gay man, you have to be this way.’ ”

Alicia Keys says she is working hard, writing and recording, and the album will be something of a complete project, meant to be heard as a whole rather than chopped up into radio-ready singles.

“Obviously record companies need to go where the business is, so we started making singles, which is cool, but there’s something so amazing about an entire body of work, a collective view, that sense that all of this music came from one artist,” she said.

Alicia’s work could be reflecting the changes in her own life. The singer married artist Swizz Beatz in 2010, getting their marriage and then-unborn child blessed in a Zulu ceremony. Alicia Keys then gave birth to son Egypt Daoud Ibarr Dean in October of that year.

Her new motherhood immediately reflected in her work. Alicia Keys teamed up with Eve for a song “Speechless,” which she dedicated to Egypt.

Alicia’s work continued to take a personal perspective. In 2011, she marked her debut as a film director with a documentary telling the stories of five women who were victims of breast cancer. For the project, Keys teamed up with actresses Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore, along with film director Petty Jenkins.

With her upcoming album, Alicia Keys is returning to a similar theme. Her last album, Girl on Fire, was also heavy with undertones of female empowerment.

“For the new album, it is a new journey. It is a new story. There’s so much that is new to talk about, and I think all of our journeys are so incredible,” Keys told MTV in 2012. “So being a new mom, a new wife, being a woman who’s really trying to find herself, take control of my life, my business, my world, I think that there comes a certain point in life where you realize that you know you can really choose the life that you want, and so it’s really about that journey and kind of finding that bravery, finding that inner-strength to trust yourself, believe in yourself and know that you really have all the tools. You don’t need anybody to validate you. You are powerful and incredible, and that’s the journey that I’ve been on and the journey I think we’re all on.”

Alicia Keys has not given an exact date for the new album, but it is expected in early 2015.