Tired of judgment, Alicia Keys quits makeup, feels liberated, beautiful

Singer Alicia Keys, who is gearing up to release her sixth studio album later this summer, says the songs were partly inspired by the pressures women face to be perfect.

Singer Alicia Keys, who is gearing up to release her sixth studio album later this summer, says the songs were partly inspired by the pressures women face to be perfect.

“I realized that during this process, I wrote a lot of songs about masks filled with metaphors about hiding,” she said. (Instagram)

“Before I started my new album, I wrote a list of all the things that I was sick of. And one was how much women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect. One of the many things I was tired of was the constant judgment of women,” Keys wrote in an essay for Lenny Letter.

Keys, 35, writes about one new song, When A Girl Can’t Be Herself, that addresses these issues with blunt admission.

“I realized that during this process, I wrote a lot of songs about masks filled with metaphors about hiding,” she said.

She says she put the song aside and didn’t think much about it until she had a photoshoot for the new album.

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“I’d just come from the gym, had a scarf under my baseball cap, and the beautiful photographer Paola (never met a Paola I didn’t like) said, ‘I have to shoot you right now, like this! The music is raw and real, and these photos have to be too!’

The photo that came from this session became the artwork for Keys’ first single from the album, In Common.

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The singer describes the image as “intimately relating,me and that baseball hat and scarf and a bunch of invisible magic circulating. And I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free, and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt.”

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