The Phone Number
The song's lyrics tell listeners that they can reach Keys by calling a particular number, 489-4608, which was her former telephone number minus the area code when she lived in New York City, according to Keys' publicist, Lois Najarian. Callers who used the correct code (347) would have received a voicemail from Keys herself. However, after listening to the song, fans tried calling the number with different area codes, and one of them, 912, turned out to be the number of a retired pastor from Statesboro, Georgia, named J.D. Turner. He claims to have received more than twenty calls a day from Keys' fans in the weeks after the song's release. This led to a $95 phone bill resulting from charges associated with the *69 last-call return option, which he used to track down each caller. Turner has declined to change his number, having held it for over fourteen years, and is using other methods to block unwanted calls.
Read more about this topic: Diary (Alicia Keys Song)
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