"There was a first phone call, and Jay hit me up like, 'I feel like I have this record that's going to be the anthem of New York.' He's like, 'The piano, the way the style [is], the whole flow, and it couldn't be the anthem of New York without you.' Obviously, I'm very grateful to him for reaching out to me and for that type of ability to represent my hometown, like, that was crazy. So we went to the studio. I went to the studio, and ... I fell in love from the jump."
-Alicia Keys, talking about how "Empire State of Mind," her collaboration with Jay-Z, got started. The song, which the duo will perform before tonight's World Series game in Yankees Stadium, took a bit of time to create, but that was because Keys knew that she had to nail it perfectly. "I did try it a couple of times, but it was more about capturing the kind of grand feeling of it," she explained to MTV News correspondent Tim Kash. "With the way I sang it the first time, I was actually kind of sick, and I knew that he needed the record, so I was like, 'Let me get to it.'" Keys' own new album The Element of Freedom will be released on December 15.