How Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Ended Up Making Beautiful Music

Alicia Keys can recall exactly how she felt when she 1st fulfilled her future partner. 

All of 14, the New York Metropolis indigenous was on track to graduate high school (as valedictorian) and enroll at Columbia College and, on the precipice of signing her 1st history deal, was previously doing work on the tunes that would become her Grammy-successful, multi-platinum 2001 debut, Songs in A Insignificant. And that’

s when a mutual close friend introduced her to a self-confident younger file producer named Kasseem Dean. With DMX‘s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” to his name, the person, regarded in the business by his expert moniker, Swizz Beatz, was now drawn to the finer things such good results afforded. 

“Swizz will have the quickest car, the biggest jewellery, the loudest jacket,” the singer, who’d already swapped her given surname of Augello-Prepare dinner for the a lot more melodic sounding Keys, told Marie Claire UK in 2013. “Almost everything with him is definitely more than the prime. I utilised to see him and assume, ‘He is so frustrating.'”

To be truthful, she confessed, she was hardly fallin’: “I failed to genuinely like him that substantially.”