At 27 and with just three studio albums to her credit, Alicia Keys is already inspiring a legion of younger female artists. One only has to watch American Idol, where aspiring divas sing her hits over and over, as proof of that.
And it appears the poetic songbird is just getting started. On top of Grammy wins, multiplatinum sales and a burgeoning acting career, Keys is a co-founder of Keep a Child Alive, a nonprofit organization that provides medicine to HIV/AIDS-affected children and families in Africa.

At 27 and with just three studio albums to her credit, Alicia Keys is already inspiring a legion of younger female artists. One only has to watch American Idol, where aspiring divas sing her hits over and over, as proof of that.

And it appears the poetic songbird is just getting started. On top of Grammy wins, multiplatinum sales and a burgeoning acting career, Keys is a co-founder of Keep a Child Alive, a nonprofit organization that provides medicine to HIV/AIDS-affected children and families in Africa.

Keys took time from her As I Am tour to field questions from Chronicle reporter Joey Guerra about songwriting, collaborating and loving Luther Vandross:

Q: You’ve said your lyrics are usually personal reflections. Are you able to write about someone else’s experience?

A: The majority of my songs have to be a reflection of my life, of my experience. That’s what kind of drives me to write. It has to be something that I understand personally. There has been on occasion, though, times when something has affected me so greatly that’s been another person’s experience. It will make me write in their perspective, or even as an observer.

Q: Is the songwriting process different each time?

A: I promise you that every time I write a song, or every time I’m working on an album, I’m like, “How in the world am I going to do this?” It’s new every time, and there’s no kind of just one way that it happens. I’m definitely sparked by emotions and things that I see with my own two eyes. It pushes me to maybe write in my journal, which I do lot; write in my songbook, which it might just be words; or just sit down at the piano and start with some music. Even just say words into my cellphone or a title.

Q: What’s it like seeing amateurs and new singers try to make your songs their own?

A: As a songwriter, that’s the best thing in the world. That’s what you want. You want people to love your songs so much that they want to sing them. I’ll think of when I was in kindergarten and — I think it was Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time. That was my song. I’m sure I sang it really badly, but I loved it that much. It’s like that.

Q: How has your music changed since the beginning of your career?

A: Definitely through my own personal experiences and growing up and becoming more mature, I think it’s become more precise and a little bit more clear. I’ve learned so much about how to create a song and different types of songs. It still doesn’t mean that you ever quite know what you’re doing.

Q: Singer or songwriter: Which would you choose if it could only be one?

A: Damn. That’s really hard, and that’s why I do both. If I absolutely had no choice, I think I would choose to be a songwriter. To be able to express that side of myself is essential to my very being, like air. To have to sing songs (by) other people who didn’t quite know me, just their assumptions of me, I feel like it would be a bit of a cage.

Q: Have your trips to Africa and Egypt been musically inspiring?

A: I actually wrote a lot of songs off of pentatonic scales (a scale with five pitches per octave, commonly used in Chinese music) and these darker Arabic scales. I was really into that for a while. I love it. I think it’s very sensual. I think it’s very emotional. I think it’s beautiful. There’s a lot to discover there.

Q: Today, songwriters mostly shy away from overtly political lyrics and messages. Is that a bad thing?

A: I do often think about the way that more societal issues and political issues can be put into the music, especially when we’re in a time that is so tumultuous. It’s constantly about what’s happening in our society and our culture, political choices that are made and what that means.

It’s funny, because when it’s so politically driven on a daily basis, you would think that the music would reflect that a bit more. I think that at one time that was so much more accepted and, in fact, encouraged. I feel that now, when one speaks strongly in a political fashion, it’s often used against them. It deters people from really embracing that beauty of describing the world in its many colors.

Q: What are you listening to these days?

A: Especially for this album (As I Am), I really got into a lot of different styles, kind of rock styles — Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin — just to really feel that energy and that fierceness and that abandonment. I also started getting into U2, R.E.M., Nirvana and Coldplay, just to kind of feel the soulfulness.

Q: As I Am has collaborations with Linda Perry and John Mayer. Who would you like to team with in the future?

A: I’ve been dying to work with the White Stripes, forever already. I’m trying to make that actually happen.

Q: Some artists — Madonna, Beyoncé — seem to take on different personas onstage. Is it the same for you?

A: I always hope that I was able to make people feel like they were engaged in something personal. I’m very, very much myself onstage. Some people become characters, and they kind of turn into another person. The things I say, the things that I do, the way that I speak, what I’m talking about, it’s pretty consistent with who I am.

Q: Do you have a favorite moment in your current live show?

A: What I purposely wanted to do with this show was really show the diversity of who I am and the way that I love to express myself in many different ways: some of them very big, some of them very intimate. But I love being able to sit down in a room of 13,000 people and just play the piano, like we’re in the living room. I know that’s what people love about me as well. We’re able to just kind of have a moment.

Q: What’s it like being name-checked in tunes by Luther Vandross and Bob Dylan?

A: Luther Vandross is one of my favorite artists. He was such a beautiful person and such a golden voice that will last forever. He called me when I was in Amsterdam. I remember like it was yesterday. It was really late. He was telling me that he did this new song, and he put my name in it. He actually proceeded to sing it to me right there over the phone. That was a beautiful experience.

(Bob Dylan,) I haven’t spoken to directly about it. But I find it kind of cute.