Photo by Yu Tsai

Alicia Keys Where: Mandalay Bay When: 8 p.m. April 9 Cost: $50 and up Info: (877) 632-7400

Back in what must now seem like a golden age of pop music, in the long-ago land of 2001, a 20-year-old singer named Alicia Keys braved the boy bands and teen pop acts of the day to release a career-defining album, one rooted in prodigious piano playing and a voice that belied her age.

In the year that Songs in A Minor topped the Billboard 200, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Aaliyah and Britney Spears also had No. 1 albums. Nine years later, it's safe to say (with the exception of Aaliyah, whose tragic death that year cut short an already stellar career), none of those singers are at what you would call a peak. Keys, meanwhile, surged back to the top of the pop charts with "Empire State of Mind."

In terms of pure numbers, The Element of Freedom, Keys' fourth studio album, has not matched the success of Songs in A Minor. But the music industry is a very different place now then it was in 2001. Songs don't typically top the charts for weeks at a time, as "Fallin'" did for a month and a half that year, and albums are now bought piecemeal over digital services like iTunes, rendering CDs irrelevant for most fans. So the tally for Element, now at 1.2 million, will probably never match the 6 million sold by Songs, or the 3 million surpassed by As I Am, her 2007 release.

And that's OK.

Keys has a whole shelf full of Grammys (12, to be exact) to her credit, as well as choice collaborations with music's top stars (Beyoncé guests on her new album), movie roles (Smokin' Aces, The Nanny Diaries and The Secret Life of Bees) and a new tour, which stops in Las Vegas on April 9 with special guests Robin Thicke and Melanie Fiona.

The Element of Freedom is the latest evolution for the singer, now 29. That Beyoncé collaboration, "Put in a Love Song," pulls the best of each singer's styles over a spare drumbeat and piano. "Doesn't Mean Anything" and "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart" are successful meditations on lost love, while her latest single, "Unthinkable (I'm Ready)" offers the flipside: a moody come-on that finds Keys hedging her bets with a lover ("If we do the unthinkable, would it make us look crazy?") before succumbing ("If you ask me, I'm ready").

Like much of the album, "Unthinkable" employs a less-is-more approach that seems to be a good MO for a singer like Keys, circa 2010. It makes for a nice counterpoint to her contemporaries on the pop charts, who tend to equate bigger with better and lack the subtlety that has always made the best singers so intriguing. For all of her massive success, we don't know whether Keys is bluffin' with her muffin or if all the boys are trying to touch her junk, junk.

And that's OK, too.