![image alicia keys family image alicia keys family](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hNIdpwUpX7c/TiAw5QWPAXI/AAAAAAAAGjk/kcPtkSUoOGE/s1600/6918229_150711_akeys4.jpg)
“Then it’s a few hours of meetings, have lunch around four, and then I’m in the studio, like, all night.” He estimates his next album is “90 percent done, so that’s where my head is.” “I get up, vibe with the kids before they go to school,” he says. “It’s all about communication.” A day earlier they celebrated Mother’s Day with their blended family, but today it’s back to business: Keys has just landed in Los Angeles to wrap her last season on The Voice and in New York, Dean narrates his workday in the low, steady calm that’s propelled him through two decades producing and recording some of the greatest hits in hip-hop and R&B and rock’n’roll (20 years ago he had one of his first major hits producing DMX’s “Ruff Ryders Anthem”). “We’ve been married seven years and we don’t fight, we don’t raise our voices,” Dean says. The Deans seem to have become experts in maintaining intimacy and mutual respect. In the photograph, Kathleen, now a law professor and also a friend of the foundation, wears her hair in a beautiful afro both exhibit the elegance and strength that the Deans embody. They had landed on Parks’s portrait of Kathleen Cleaver and her former husband, the late Eldridge Cleaver, made in 1970 when both were leaders in the Black Panther Party. “We were looking at Gordon’s pictures, and Swizz said, I feel like this is the one,” Keys recalls. For the past six or seven years, the couple has been friends and co-chairs of the Gordon Parks Foundation. When they began to envision their photo shoot-“It’s our first cover shoot together!” Dean reminds his wife-they looked for inspiration to the work of Gordon Parks, the pioneering photographer, filmmaker, musician and activist. “Want to take this one first, my love?” she says, in moments that make it feel like we’re all sitting in the same room, instead of on opposite coasts. There’s a familiar warmth in her tone, especially when addressing her husband, Kasseem Dean, aka Swizz Beatz. The owner of the impossibly silky, dynamic voice that the world first heard cascading up and down multiple octaves 17 years ago in “Fallin’” is unmistakable even in casual conversation. It’s a Monday, and Alicia Keys-Dean sounds awfully serene for someone who’s just gotten off a cross-country flight. Alicia Keys-Dean and Kasseem Dean styled by Emma Pritchard.