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The Water Dancer. “When I hear SZA’s lyrics, it
feels like it’s definitively her — this really human,
young, black woman who is sometimes insecure
about her body, other times feels really sexy,
sometimes falls really hard,” Coates says. “That’s
what an artist is supposed to do. Once they get
into that specificity of who they are, that’s when
they’re touching the most human aspect of it.”
Top Dawg Entertainment co-president
Terrence “Punch” Henderson took notice, too,
signing SZA as the label’s first woman artist in- Ctrl, the debut album that followed in
2017, made her a star. She stood out by writing
the way a woman’s internal monologue might
actually sound, oscillating between public-facing
bite and what are usually privately-held insecuri-
ties. (“Let me tell you a secret/I’ve been secretly
banging your homeboy,” she sang 43 seconds
into her hit “Supermodel,” before allowing,
“Wish I was comfortable just with myself.”)
As millennial coming-of-age texts go, Ctrl is on
a level all its own: It sounds like a vulnerable
twentysomething’s stream of consciousness,
brimming with anxieties,
discontented love stories, and a
range of pop- culture references
one can only absorb from grow-
ing up on the internet.
Since being signed, SZA
has garnered nine Grammy
nominations, performed on
Coachella’s main stage, and
written and sung on tracks by
superstars from Beyoncé to
Post Malone. “All the Stars,”
her 2018 collaboration with
labelmate Kendrick Lamar for
the Black Panther soundtrack,
has been streamed nearly 700
million times on Spotify. Still,
she says she feels dogged by a
sense of guilt, like she needs to
do more. She considers herself
to be shy and awkward, and to
this day says she still doesn’t
feel worthy when she steps
onstage: “I’m always shocked
that people are there.”
It’s been nearly three years
since Ctrl was released, and
SZA’s very committed fan base has grown impa-
tient. When she tweets these days, no matter the
subject, the replies invariably turn into a chorus
of inquiries about her next project (“Honey, i
want some new music pls not facts about dino-
saurs’ farts,” to cite a recent example), and the
few snippets she’s shared have been carefully
cataloged online. Even SZA, when we first sit
down together in late January, asks me warily,
“Is this supposed to be about the album?”
and it made her cry like she had lost a person.
She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, so
she wrapped it in a T-shirt and left it at the base
of a tree in her backyard.
“Each of these are toned to different chakras
in your body,” she says, pointing to them one
by one. “So this is a low D. This is your high B,
which is your astral plane of your crown chakra.”
She continues down the line. Each bowl’s
material dictates its healing properties, she
explains: Selenite and pink salt are for cleans-
ing, morganite is for love and kindness. Sitting
cross-legged on the floor, she begins to play them
by drawing her mallet around the bowls’ rims.
“You pick whatever note comes to your mind
naturally, and you imagine it squeezing out of
your body. You compress it, like this,” she says,
pressing her hands to her chest. “Push it out.” A
note emerges from SZA’s lips, clear and full.
As the sparsely furnished room starts to vi-
brate, she joins her bowls in a duet, singing out
brilliant, single-note tones as the mood strikes
her. All of the sounds start to meld together,
surging and falling. Five minutes pass like
this, just SZA sitting cross-legged on the floor
in sweats, contentedly playing a one- woman
sound-bowl show in the middle of the night.
When she is feeling dark, SZA says as she plays,
she will pick a word and sing it with intention.
“I’m blessed, I’m well, I’m well,” she sings out
suddenly, in tune with one of the instruments.
She pauses for a moment and sighs. “It works.
I feel, like, 10 times better already.”G
ROWING UP IN suburban Maplewood,
New Jersey, Solána Imani Rowe felt
she had a chip on her shoulder. In
high school, she recalls, “I wanted to
be liked and have a good time, but it just wasn’t
in the books for me.” She skipped her prom to
go to South Beach with her mom and a few close
friends, and one night found herself partying in
the VIP section of a club, not far from Lil Wayne
and Diddy. The trip, she says, “kind of cracked
the door open. I was like, ‘Fuck this, I don’t have
any friends anyway. There’s nothing to stick
around for. I might as well go chase more.’ ”
She went to college to study marine biology,
then worked retail and service jobs while
making music on the side. Around 2012, back
when artists could still develop a following off
of self-released SoundCloud tracks, she started
generating buzz online with songs like “After-
math,” whose heady lyrics (“I am not human/I
am made of bacon, fairy tales, pixie dust, I don’t
feel”) helped draw in fans.
One of them was the author Ta-Nehisi Coates,
who copied another line from “Aftermath” (“You
don’t have to kidnap/I’d like to be kidnapped”)
into a notebook while writing his 2019 novelWhen I arrive at her spacious two-story Tudor
house around 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night, SZA
has just finished cooking dinner for herself and
a couple of friends. She looks ready for bed, in
gray sweatpants and a cropped green Cham-
pion sweatshirt. Instead, she sprawls on her
plush white carpet with the comfort of a former
gymnast, which she is, and slowly rolls herself
a joint.
The free-associative, playful way of thinking
that SZA’s known for in her songwriting comes
across in conversation as well — an aside about
how much she admires a certain musician, for
example, turns into extended musing about
men in the industry who possess “Johnny Bravo
energy” (a work-in-progress list: King Krule,
Frank Ocean, Future). She flashes her eyes
conspiratorially when she’s amused or intrigued,
and shows a true stoner’s dualism: external
curiosity and inward-facing thoughtfulness in
equal measure.
She says she’s nervous about her first proper
interview in a year, but speaks so openly that it
almost seems like she’s been waiting for an op-
portunity to explain herself. It has been, in SZA’s
words, “a wild-ass fucking year,” full of grief and
introspection. She’s just beginning to process
it all, through wellness practices and, in stages,
through her music.
About that: “Music is coming
out this year for sure,” she says.
“An album? Strong words.” The
much- reported rumor that she
was planning on releasing a tril-
ogy of albums and then retiring,
she says, is nonsense.
“I can always make music.
It’s who I am,” she says. “So if I
started making fucking sculp-
tures and decide to take up ento-
mology, I’m still probably going
to drop something. I am also
getting to know myself. Because
if I keep trying to regurgitate the
same girl, y’all are going to hate that shit. And I
don’t want that either.”
She’s aware of the pressure, though. “I’ve
dropped nothing but features,” she says. “People
don’t know who the fuck I am, right? They think
I’m on some stupid superstar shiny shit. I know
people are tired of seeing that. They want to see
me. I owe people that. So I’m going to do that.”
She’s been drawing inspiration from jazz
(Miles Davis, John Coltrane) and a truly eclectic
playlist she made “from my childhood,” which
jumps around from the Beach Boys to Ella
Fitzgerald to Australian neo-soul group Hiatus
Kaiyote. “I don’t even give a fuck about cohe-
sion,” she adds. “If you sound like you, your
shit’s going to be cohesive. Period.”You really have
to choose to feel
better. Because
if you don’t, you
just die. I’m trying
to remind myself
that I’m worth
something and
talented.