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Girl on Fire Alicia Keys covers the December/January 2013 issue of COMPLEX Magazine where she discusses her evolution as an artist, musical freedom, and how becoming a mother has changed her.  Describing her new album, Girl on Fire, like a lion breaking free from a cage, Alicia revealed that she has now gotten to the place where she can truly feel “freedom” as an artist, a woman and a mother. See the highlights below and more pics below:

On musical freedom:

“Before making this record, in some ways I felt like a lion locked in a cage,” she wrote. “I felt like a girl misunderstood that no one really knew. I felt like it was time to stop making excuses for any part of my life that I wanted to change. Once I made that choice I became a girl on fire, the lion broke free!”

On becoming her “new” self:

“Becoming my new self, some people didn’t understand me anymore. Some people who I knew for years—we couldn’t be on the same page anymore. That’s OK because that’s part of growing, too. The hardest thing is to trust yourself, to know that what you’re feeling is valid. A lot of times we dismiss our feelings. I realized that I can trust myself and say, ‘No, I’m not comfortable with that.’ That was the toughest part. When I finally had the bravery to do that, that’s when I started to feel on fire.”

On how motherhood changed her:

Motherhood was a big part of me breaking free. Before I gave birth to Egypt, there was a certain energy of wanting to fix things. Women want to clean stuff up before the baby comes. I refused to be in any circumstance that would give negative energy to this. That was what pushed me over the edge. It was becoming a woman. I was a girl, and now I’m a woman.

On not getting too personal with her songwriting:

The whole freaking world is looking at your shit. It’s scary. I didn’t want to say every single thing because you don’t want people to know that. There’s personal and there’s public, and I deserve the right to have a personal space.

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