Songfacts®:

• Alicia Keys was 20 years old when she released her debut album, Songs In A Minor, but she started writing songs for the project when she was just 14, a year before she signed with Columbia Records. The first one, or at least the first good one, she says, was "Butterflyz," a romantic track about a boy who gives her butterflies - the figurative ones that flutter in your stomach when you're nervous - that make her feel high on love.
  
  Keys reflected on the song's significance in a 2022 Library of Congress interview: "I've written other songs for sure, but that one was the one that started to reveal itself, that when I connected to my actual feelings and wrote what I was experiencing, it really, really made a difference. That was a big one."
• When things didn't pan out with Columbia Records - she didn't click with the writers and producers at the label, who wanted her to change her sound and her look - she moved on to Arista Records founder Clive Davis' new label, J Records.
• This was used in the 2002 movie Drumline, starring Nick Cannon.
• Bolstered by its smash lead single, "Fallin'," the album was a huge hit. It debuted at #1 on the US albums chart, and spent three non-consecutive weeks at the top and was one of the best-selling albums of 2001 with more than 10 million copies sold.