Alicia Keys can remember exactly how she felt when she first met her future husband.
All of 14, the New York City native was on track to graduate high school (as valedictorian) and enroll at Columbia University and, on the precipice of signing her first record deal, was already working on the music that would become her Grammy-winning, multi-platinum 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor. And that’
s when a mutual friend introduced her to a confident young record producer named Kasseem Dean. With DMX‘s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” to his name, the man, known in the industry by his professional moniker, Swizz Beatz, was already drawn to the finer things such success afforded.
“Swizz will have the fastest car, the biggest jewelry, the loudest jacket,” the singer, who’d already swapped her given surname of Augello-Cook for the more melodic sounding Keys, told Marie Claire UK in 2013. “Everything with him is really over the top. I used to see him and think, ‘He is so annoying.'”
To be truthful, she confessed, she was hardly fallin’: “I didn’t really like him that much.”
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