Tears for Water: Poetry & Lyrics - Softcover

Keys, Alicia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425205606 ISBN 13: 9780425205600

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2005

Synopsis

From acclaimed musician Alicia Keys comes a revealing songbook of collected poems and lyrics that document her growth as a person, a woman, and an artist.

“All my life, I’ve written these words with no thought or intention of sharing them. Not even with my confidants. These are my most delicate thoughts. The ones that I wrote down just so I could understand what in the world these things I was thinking meant...” 

When she burst onto the music scene with her multi-million bestselling, Grammy® Award-winning first album, Songs in A Minor, Alicia Keys became a superstar. Two decades later, her career has expanded into producing, acting, and passionate activism—winning her worldwide acclaim, numerous awards, and a spot on Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People.”

Though Alicia has been very vocal through her career, there were always “delicate thoughts” that she never before imagined she’d share with anyone else—until now. In Tears for Water, Alicia Keys opens the journals and notebooks that she has kept throughout her life and reveals her heart to her fans in return for all the love they have shown to her and her music.

Hello morning
now I see you
cause I am awake
What was once so sweet and secure
has turned out to be fake
Girl, you can’t be scared
gotta stand up tall and let ’em see what shines in you
Push aside the part
lying in your heart
like the ocean is deep, dark and blue

—from Golden Child

About this title

About the Author

Alicia Keys is a modern-day Renaissance woman—a 15-time Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter/musician/producer, an accomplished actress, a New York Times bestselling author, a film, television, and broadway producer, an entrepreneur, and a powerful force in the world of activism. 

Since the release of her monumental 2001 debut album, songs in A minor, Keys has sold over 30 million records and built an unparalleled repertoire of hits and accomplishments. Keys resides in the New York City area with her husband, producer/visionary and entrepreneur Swizz Beatz, and their children.

From Publishers Weekly

No doubt Keys has a fascinating story to tell—raised by a single mother, she's a classically trained, New York born-and-bred neo-soulster with two multiplatinum albums and five Grammys to her name—but she merely hints at it in this gathering of poems and lyrics. With their themes of loneliness, confusion, wonder and desire, most of Keys's free-verse poems could be the cris de coeur of any American 20-something: "Sometimes I feel/ like I don't belong anywhere/ And it's going to take so long/ for me to get somewhere/ Sometimes I feel so heavy-hearted/ but I can't explain/ cause I'm so guarded." But other poems hint at her world travels, her budding sense of social justice and her concerns about stardom ("When gone is the glory/ When gone is the shine/ Is gone the whole/ Of your fortune and pride?"). Nearly half of the book consists of lyrics from her two albums, Songs in A Minor and The Diary of Alicia Keys; while they make a nice complement to the poems, the words feel a bit flat without the blaxploitation beat of "Heartburn," say, or the impassioned vocal delivery of "Fallin.' " For the Keys completist, however, this will be a compelling book of rock ephemera.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0425205606
• ISBN 13: 9780425205600
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192