Herald: Why don’t we ever see your name next to Amy Winehouse’s or Lindsay Lohan’s doing bad things? What’s your secret to being so normal and staying grounded?

Keys: My trick to being normal and staying grounded is being normal and staying grounded. It’s the way I like my life to be. I love to have my privacy. Now I love meeting people too, so if I’m out on the street and someone spots me I greet them and thank them for saying hi. But I explain that I’m out with my family and move on without a lot of fanfare. I think it really disarms people. People go, “Wow, she’s just a regular person.” But they also become aware of my boundaries.

You seem to put a lot of effort into charity work. I know your Keep a Child Alive organization is a big part of your life. Have you always been interested in issues of global health and poverty, or is this new for you?

I’ve always been an empathic person. But I hadn’t been outside of America much until I started touring. That’s when I got to know what was going on with Africa’s AIDS pandemic. As I learned about the lack of access to medicines and orphan issues, the problems started to pull at me. So Keep a Child Alive has actually been around for almost 10 years now. We provide the medicine for children and families who have AIDS and wouldn’t be able to afford it.

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