Kerry Brothers, Jr., also known as "K" or "Krucial", is an American songwriter and record producer, and is the rumored boyfriend of multiple Grammy Award-winning R&B and soul singer Alicia Keys, with whom he has worked on her three studio albums Songs in A Minor (2001), The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003), and As I Am (2007). Brothers and Keys are the co-founders of KrucialKeys Enterprises, an independent music production company, and they also co-own a Long Island-based recording studio named The Oven Studios. In addition to Keys, he has worked with R&B and hip hop artists like Mario, Rakim, Angie Stone, Nas, and Keyshia Cole. In a prolific musical partnership with Keys that first developed in the early 1990s, Brothers helped write and produce a number of tracks for her debut and second albums, Songs in A Minor and The Diary of Alicia Keys, respectively, which have both sold over seventeen million copies worldwide. Brothers has produced, written, arranged, and composed songs that have appeared on motion picture soundtracks such as Doctor Doolittle, Drumline, Shaft, and Ali.