SC
OT
T^ G
AR
FIT
T/S
HU
TT
ER
ST
OC
K
March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 51
“She has so much range,” TDE’s Henderson
tells me later. “She can do alternative rock, tradi-
tional R&B, hip-hop, country. It’s a new chapter.
She’s not scared to try certain things now.”
SZA recently spent time in the studio with
Timbaland (“He played fucking Brazilian jazz-
type beats, and I popped off to that”), and she
had a revelatory session with Sia (they wrote
three songs together, and SZA says the “Chan-
delier” singer “manifested the best of me”).
And back in October, she took a phone call one
morning from a man with a thick, put-on accent,
asking her to perform at some international fes-
tival. After a while, he dropped the ruse and told
her, “This is Stevie.” “I was like, ‘Stevie who?’
He’s like, ‘Stevie Wonder.’ ”
He asked her to join him onstage at his annual
Taste of Soul festival in L.A. the next day, and
she flew her dad out to see it. She jokes that
it was the first time she’d ever gotten up for a
9 a.m. soundcheck. Before they performed,
she and Wonder spent two hours together in his
trailer, freestyling at the piano. She plays me a
bit from the recording — just her and Wonder
exchanging vocal riffs over his keys — and
mentions that she’s excerpted it for five different
potential beats. “I have nowhere else to go from
here,” she says, laughing. “That was scary for
me, because that’s the top of my bucket list.”
SZA lights up when she recounts that morning
with Wonder, and the more she talks, the clearer
it is why: It was a bright spot amid a sequence
of intense personal losses that have made herfans’ insatiable hunger for new music feel even
more overwhelming. First, her close friend and
collaborator Mac Miller died from an accidental
overdose in the fall of 2018. Then, in early 2019,
her maternal grandmother Norma’s health took
a turn for the worse.
SZA spent much of last year traveling fre-
quently between L.A. and New Jersey, where
Norma was in hospice care, making it difficult to
get in a creative groove in the studio. Everything
felt up in the air. “I’ve been in the airport on the
way to see my grandmother on life support,” she
says, “and [fans] are like, ‘Aw, girl, what are you
doing here? Can I get this picture now?’ ”
At home, she helped change her grand-
mother’s diapers and colostomy bags, and tried
to be there for her own grieving mother. “My
grandma was like my best friend,” she says. “It
was the longest five months of my life.” In May,
when Norma was really struggling, SZA per-
formed on Saturday Night Live with DJ Khaled,
which made her feel immense guilt.
Recounting all this from the floor in her living
room, she starts to cry — first silently, and then
in steady, quiet sobs. “I didn’t want to make
music,” she says. “I didn’t. I was just trying to
not kill myself, and not quit, period. Because it
was really fucking hard, and lonely as fuck.”
Norma died in June, at age 90. Five months
later, in November, SZA’s maternal aunt died
unexpectedly. “I’ve buried so many people in
my life, you would think that I would be used
to it, or just have a threshold. But my grandmabroke the threshold for me. It was so weird to
not have any.. .” — her voice breaks — “I don’t
know, any control over anything.”
To begin what she calls “my own journey out
of this dark-ass depression,” SZA leaned into
exercise and wellness. She committed herself
to going to the gym every day and practicing
Pilates; she got into crystals and meditation and
sound bowls. (In December, she performed with
the latter publicly for the first time at a chapel in
Rancho Palos Verdes, California.) She says all of
these things, bit by bit, started to help.
“You really have to choose to feel better. You
have to. Have to,” she says through tears, pound-
ing her floor for emphasis. “Because if you
don’t, you just die. I decided I’m going to choose
that shit for my fucking self, for real. I’m just
trying to do everything that is meaningful, and
do shit that’s passionate, and remind myself that
I’m worth something and talented and a nice
girl. Just basic shit.” She pauses and collects her-
self. “So that’s what the fuck I’ve been doing.”A
WEEK LATER, SZA is back in L.A.,
fresh off a productive trip to Kauai.
She extended her stay for an extra
day, building a “crystal grid” around
her microphone, working from 3 p.m. to 4
a.m. each night, and writing four new songs,
including one that she describes as “a trap song
from the perspective of Joni Mitchell.” She swam
in the ocean under the stars and saw a sea turtle
swimming next to her. “I broke into tears on the
second night,” she says. “There were so many
stars it made me feel like, ‘Oh, God, where am I,
for real? What is this planet?’ ”
After a single night at home, she’ll get on
another plane, to Miami, to work with Pharrell,
whom she’s idolized for years: “I’ve stalked
him my whole life.” Their paths first crossed
when she was a teenage intern at his clothing
company, Billionaire Boys Club. One day, she
was tasked with bringing clothes to a N.E.R.D.
music-video set, and they had her pose for the
cameras. (Sure enough, 37 seconds into the
“Everyone Nose” video, there’s high school SZA.)
A decade later, she’s writing music with him.
Lately, she’s been working toward gradual
growth, instead of seeing everything happening
all at once. “It’s about recording every single
day, with the idea and intention that you’re
chipping away at this invisible thing that will
eventually reveal itself,” SZA says.
In Hawaii, she adds, “every day became its
own nucleus of ideas and experimentations,
which led to making some shit I haven’t heard
before. Usually when I hear something that I
haven’t heard before, I hear it from somebody
else. It’s exciting when I’m hearing shit I haven’t
heard before, and it’s coming from me.”SZA
performing
in London,
2018