The Diary of Alicia Keys and As I Am extended that foundation. Her work also includes the Jay-Z collaboration Empire State of Mind, connecting an individual vocal style with a song closely associated with New York.

Her official catalogue spans intimate songs, collaborative records and later projects including ALICIA and KEYS. Beyond recording, the Recording Academy documents her co-founding role in Keep a Child Alive.

Hell’s Kitchen uses Keys’s music to tell the story of Ali, a seventeen-year-old finding her direction in New York. Its official description identifies the show as inspired by Keys’s life and community. It is a staged story with a cast, rather than a concert in which Keys performs her own biography.

Keys wrote the music and lyrics; Kristoffer Diaz wrote the book. The score combines existing songs, including Fallin’ and If I Ain’t Got You, with material written for the production. Keys does not appear in the musical, an important distinction when choosing between a theatre ticket and one of her own performances.

The production biography identifies KEYS (Originals and Unlocked) as a double album released in 2021, followed by a deluxe version in 2022. Those dates describe different editions of the same project. They should not be counted as two unrelated studio albums when tracing her recording history.

That biography also documents More Myself: A Journey and the 2022 graphic novel Girl on Fire. Together with her theatre writing, these projects show why an artist catalogue alone does not cover all of her creative work: prose, illustrated storytelling and a musical have their own collaborators and credits.