it, and Julie is like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was a classic
meet-cute where there’s the bumbling, lovable
oaf running around touching the art, screaming at
people,” says Lizzo. “But in her mind, she probably
loved that I wasn’t timid and my balls didn’t go up
to my stomach.”
Lizzo already had a fan base and a healthy tour-
ing business, so after joining the Atlantic family in
2016, she worked with Reed to find a sound that
melded all of her talents — high-spirited raps,
gospel notes, gooey R&B — and further opened her
up to pop and urban music audiences. “I was just
like, ‘Let’s see what the fuck happens,’ ” she says.
“I’d never really written a big fucking pop banger
before, and Ricky was the guy to do that with.”
One of the first songs they came up with was the
soulful pep talk “Good as Hell.” (The song has also
benefited from the momentum of “Truth Hurts,”
reaching No. 41 on the Hot 100 in September, over
three years after its release.) “Once we settled into
a groove,” recalls Reed, “it was liberating because
we were like, ‘Lizzo is doing these big-ass shows —
let’s just keep doing songs that build her story and
her career.’ ”
For her visuals and creative concepts, she relied
on collaborators from her days as an independent
artist, which included old friends like Eris and
Wilson. Not only did they intimately understand
Lizzo’s vision, they were resourceful. Wilson recalls
making the artwork for Lizzo’s 2017 track “Water
Me” by filling up a child’s inflatable pool with gallons
of milk. The early creative impressed Atlantic and
encouraged Lizzo and Wilson to keep taking risks.
Lizzo’s performance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in
late January, in which she snaked her way from the
backstage area into the audience before embellishing
“Juice” with a flute solo, was particularly inventive:
Word-of-mouth around it led to a significant spike in
Google searches for Lizzo in the days after.
“I felt like we had to prove ourselves, of course,
because we were so young, and we’re young black
women in the industry,” Lizzo says of her inner cir-
cle. “But we believed in ourselves, and we believed
in the projects, and fighting for creative integrity
wasn’t difficult.”
A
FTER RELEASING THE 2016 EP
Coconut Oil, Lizzo spent the next
two years unleashing a steady stream
of tracks that captured her ebul-
lience and, more crucially, offered
multiple entry points for new audiences. She test-
ed out minimalist hip-hop on “Fitness”; she went
retro-funk on “Boys,” which she released in June
2018 to coincide with Pride celebrations. Lizzo
admits that hammering out the right songs to cap-
ture all sides of her artistry could feel like a slow
process, but it had advantages: As she bided her
time for an album, these tracks typically arrived
simultaneously with videos spearheaded by Lizzo
and Wilson, making each release a mini- statement
that deepened her fan base. In 2018, she also
toured with Haim and Florence + The Machine,
expanding her reach yet again.
“I can do anything, you know?” says Lizzo. “You
want a polished, choreographed performance? I
can give you that. You want a wild rock’n’roll show?
I can give you that. You want to feel like you’re in
church? I can give you that.”
Then, in the winter of that year, she and Reed
finished “Juice,” a song that struck them as a monster
hit and led Atlantic to pull the trigger on an album
campaign. If “Truth Hurts” didn’t perform as they
had hoped, they weren’t going to miss their shot
with “Juice.” They kicked off 2019 by releasing the
track alongside an ’80s- inspired video (directed by
Wilson) that features Lizzo rocking choreography in
Jane Fonda-esque spandex; it now has over 36 mil-
lion views on YouTube. Next, they timed the April
release of Cuz I Love You to her second-weekend
Coachella performance and the start of a tour. Be-
tween January and March, she made the rounds on
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (where she
fashioned herself as a human disco ball and threw in
a bit of “The Hustle” for nonmillennial viewers) and
U.K. program The Jonathan Ross Show (where she
offered a brief history lesson on twerking). “Besides
getting music out, our approach always was to get
anyone and everyone out to a show,” explains Beisler.
“All you need to do is put her into a room.”
It helped that the feel-good quality of her music
had already made her a favorite among licensing
executives. Atlantic Records West Coast presi-
dent Kevin Weaver and vp film/TV/video games
Kristy Gibson had facilitated dozens of synchs for
Lizzo. Her music has been featured in Barbershop:
The Next Cut, Girls Trip, A Bad Moms Christmas,
Insecure and other shows and movies. Lizzo vets
each opportunity personally. “I get so many emails
every single day about synch requests,” she says.
“I look through it, make sure it’s not problematic,
and I say, ‘Approved.’ ”
And then, just as “Juice” was making waves,
Netflix scooped up “Truth Hurts” for Someone
Great. Both Weaver and Gibson say the song in-
stantly picked up. “That one was magic in a bottle.
It revived the song a full two years later, and we
watched it happening in real time,” says Gibson.
“I’ve been here for 11 years, and I don’t know if I’ve
ever seen anything have a resurgence like that.”
Despite all their planning around “Juice,” Beisler
says the team was happy to pivot. They quickly shift-
ed attention and resources toward “Truth Hurts,”
adding it to a deluxe version of Cuz I Love You — a
move that makes the song eligible for the 2020
Grammys (along with the fact that it was not sub-
mitted for consideration in a previous year). By May,
“Truth Hurts” had jumped to No. 28 on the Stream-
ing Songs chart. A few weeks later, Lizzo spotlighted
the song again with a spectacular wedding- inspired
set at the BET Awards that resembled hip-hop’s
answer to Madonna’s star- making 1984 VMAs per-
formance. The next month, Lizzo did the opposite:
a stripped-down NPR Tiny Desk concert that once
again spoke to her versatility across audiences. A
well-timed “Truth Hurts” remix with fellow Hot 100
ascendant DaBaby came in August, and then her
VMAs spot gave the song one last boost before it
reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 a week later.
Lizzo says she never quite pictured this level of
mainstream stardom. “I saw myself as a successful
musician, and I visualized it like, ‘Man, I want to have
a career like Björk, where I can put out albums and do
exclusive shows and do a whole flute album like that
bitch did,’ ” she says. “This shit is way different. I’m
like, ‘VMAs, BET Awards?’ That is wild to me.”
What her success reinforces for her, more than
anything, is her responsibility to the fans and the
groups she represents. She’s committed to creating
opportunities and opening doors for plus-sized and
black women. She takes pride in the fact that the
Big Grrrls have scored agency contracts and com-
mercials after years of “being denied work because
of their size.” And she still gets chills seeing her
blunt message of self-love rippling across the mass-
es. “I got thousands and thousands of people saying,
‘I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be your side
chick,’ ” she says, her voice rising in the restaurant.
It took some time, but it happened. In the pro-
cess, she did what she thinks the most exciting art-
ists of this era have been doing: becoming a genre of
their own. “There’s that pop moment, when people
can’t really replace you. They’re like, ‘What is this?
I can only get this here,’ ” she says. “That’s that
good shit. That’s that pure shit.”
“You want a polished, choreographed performance?
I can give you that. You want a wild rock’n’roll show?
I can give you that. You want to feel like
you’re in church? I can give you that.”
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YSee How It Went Down with Lizzo’s song “Truth Hurts” at billboard.com/videos. SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 • WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 1 3 7