There were plenty of artists retooling soul and R&B for the hip-hop era at the turn of the millennium, but Alicia Keys had something that set her apart: a set of magic fingers on the piano. A prodigy who graduated from high school at 16 and dropped out of Columbia to pursue music, Alicia Keys was a classical pianist by training. As a teenager, she’d swerved from the Beethoven and Mozart of her childhood into jazz and R&B, but that early, rigorous study gave her a connection to her instrument that bordered on the mystical. Though she was 20 when the album was released, Keys had written most of Songs in A Minor while still in high school; it’s a mix of cheeky, heart-ripped-open teenage energy and startling musical maturity. “Fallin’”, the first single, was unlike anything else on the radio at the time, swooping to the top of the Billboard charts with its searching piano line and rushes of intensely conflicted emotion. The album twitches with sass (“Girlfriend” and “Rock wit U”), and then Keys turns around and delivers a song like “Lovin U” with jazzy authority. The result was a heady mix that set a high bar for R&B in the coming decade. Songs in A Minor represents the musings of a precocious, talented girl navigating a big city—in this case, Manhattan. “Caged Bird”, a lesser-known cut near the end of the album, may best capture what Songs in A Minor was to Keys: a chance for a spectacular talent to follow her song out of the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen and into a new, rarefied world of art and music that would become her home.