Thanks to the five Grammies she won two years ago as well as the multi-platinum sales for the 2001 debut album, Songs in a Minor, Alicia Keys faced a dilemma with the release of her sophomore disc, The Diary of Alicia Keys. Since her last work received fulsome praise, expectations for this latest work were higher.

Like last time, Keys acts not only as a songwriter but also as a classically trained pianist.

She surprises with the six-minute song, You Don't Know My Name. Featuring a sample from The Main Ingredient's Let Me Prove My Love to You, the song is produced by Kanye West. Unfortunately, the track is the disc's only moment of brilliance.

When You Really Love Someone is little more than Fallen recycled. Her strength has always been the mid-tempo ballad and thus the talents of Easy Mo Be and Vidal Davis were brought in on some tracks. Mo Be works for Keys' remake of the Gladys Knight and Pips' classic If I Were Your Woman. Harris surprisingly contributes the project's most hip-hop influenced track.

Because Keys was initially championed as a musical prodigy, there were obvious pressures for this CD to make her musical vision more prominent. She is not quite there yet, though tracks like Slow Down and Wake Up suggest that she is getting close.

Editor: Wings