There is a silent plague that kills more music careers than drug overdoses, plane crashes and guest appearances on American Dreams combined. It's called second-album syndrome, and it is a cruel and unpredictable assassin. Paula Cole, the promising pop-folk bohemian of the late '90s, got seven Grammy nominations for her major-label debut, then inexplicably decided to go disco. Search parties have all but given up hope of finding her. Second-album syndrome usually works quickly, but it can also behave like a slow, dignity-robbing virus. Britney Spears had a choice when putting together her second album--establish a pattern of artistic evolution or repeat the formula of her initial titillating success. She called that second album Oops! ... I Did It Again, and she now clings to relevance by an ever loosening bra strap.
Alicia Keys, who releases her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, on Dec. 2, understandably does not want to hear any of this. "People have this thing about the second album," says Keys, "like it's supposed to be scary and full of omens, like we must all collapse and be frightened now. And for me, everything is so much better on this album. My first album, I felt good about it, but I didn't know what I was doing. That's scary. It's one thing to sit in front of a piano and write songs. It's a whole other thing to put a record together."
Only now are people beginning to notice that Keys' 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor, wasn't actually a complete record. A Minor won five Grammys and sold 6 million copies, but it was a much better media event than an album. Most of the excitement was over one song, Fallin', a little miracle of a soul ballad that merged the grooves of Mary J. Blige with the grieving of Carole King. Fallin' is one of the best love songs of the past decade. To dislike it is to dislike pop music. But the strength of Fallin', combined with the compelling and oft repeated details of Keys' bio--she was raised by a single mom in one of Manhattan's rougher neighborhoods and received "classical training" on the piano--obscured the fact that most of A Minor was pretty average.
What was extraordinary was how Keys, 22, handled herself following the publicity maelstrom. After her Grammy-night triumph--she missed out on Album of the Year but got a bouquet from fellow Album losers U2 with a card that said, "We're Fallin' for U2"; "It was very cute," says Keys--she went home and splurged on a dream apartment in Queens. If you are unfamiliar with the social inferences of New York City geography, a celebrity buying a dream home in Queens is like an heiress shopping for a necklace at Zales. "It's a cool part of Queens," Keys says without a hint of defensiveness. "There's a mall really close by. A good mall."