Alicia Keys becomes the cover star for InStyle’s July 2020 Issue in a naturally radiant photo “photographed by her family.”
In the thick of quarantine, the interview was via Zoom with photographs taken at home by her husband and sons. Talking to InStyle’s Christopher Bagley, the multiple Grammy award winner who rose to fame in her 20s revealed, “I swear, I wouldn’t go back to being 20 if somebody paid me — it was literally the worst time ever.” She added, “I wanted to fit in so desperately. I was so blind, so dependent on everybody else’s opinions, so uncomfortable, so unclear.”
The 39-year-old talked about her journey to self-realisation from stripping away masks to a reflective trip to Egypt down to her marriage and family. When asked if her inspiring songs like Woman’s Worth and Girl On Fire have roots in her evolution, she replied, “All of them! Truly. There hasn’t been one that I wrote because I actually believed it at the time. I needed to pull myself out of a rut or a place of confusion.”
“I’m coming to the place now where I’m able to live more fully in my skin, my imperfections, my feelings, which are so hard to access,” she says now with better knowledge of herself. Realizing the true meaning of humility, she adds, “I’ve learned that I can totally remain humble but I don’t have to cut off the wonderful things that I deserve.”
And on hope for humanity, she says, “I really believe that we are it — we are what we’re waiting for, what we’re looking for,” she says. “The way we raise our kids, the way we choose to be with each other, the way we face the world — that is how things will start to shift.”
