Ten years ago today (Nov. 7th), Alicia Keys released her third studio album As I Am. Winning three GRAMMY Awards (two for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, one for Best R&B Song and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals), the album has sold over five million copies worldwide thus far.
To commemorate the project, Keys has shared a previously-vaulted song from the sessions, “When You Were Gone.” “This is one of the very first songs I came back from Egypt and wrote,” Alicia said. “Maybe it was the second song, the first one had a whole Egyptian vibe, I’ll play that for you one day too. But this one really started to create the sound that As I Am has. We were experimenting with a lot of keyboards and sounds and styles of recording, and we were all about breaking boundaries and writing things in new ways.”
