Fallin

"Fallin'" announced a twenty-year-old with a classical conservatory background and the nerve to open her debut with a minor-key blues over a hip-hop drum program — and no chorus in the conventional sense, just a four-bar cell that circles like the compulsion it describes. The production is startlingly spare for 2001: Keys's own piano, a stiff, dry beat, a gospel choir that arrives to answer her rather than decorate her, and strings that stay out of the way. Her voice is the whole event, cracked and smoky in the low register, then leaping into a raw belted "I keep on fallin'" that never sounds polished — the flaws are the feeling. The lyric describes a love that oscillates rather than progresses, in and out of love with the same person, which is a more honest account of long entanglement than most songs attempt. Arriving amid the gloss of turn-of-the-millennium teen pop and the rise of ultra-produced R&B, it sounded like a rebuke, swept five Grammys, and made "singer-songwriter at the piano" viable for a whole generation of Black women artists. Best played loud in an empty room where you can attempt the belt without witnesses.