“I’m Not Meant To Be Famous, I Just Keep Trying To Rise To The Occasion”: SZA Gives Her Most Revealing Interview To Date

Even though I have spent two days with SZA, I have not met her yet. She is in the hotel room the floor above mine. She is in the car ahead of ours. She is behind the only door backstage that is shut. Although she’s only ever metres from me, she feels worlds away, a sort of mythical being so clandestine she is only spoken of through cautious words and meaningful looks, cordoned off somewhere beyond the veil.

Over this warm June weekend, none of us have seen her in person, from what I understand – not her managers, not her crew, possibly not even her parents. (When we do meet, all of a sudden arm-to-arm in an upgraded Mercedes-Benz, her New York-based PR will start off by teasing that they “haven’t seen each other for a long time, even though I’ve been in London for about four or five days”.)

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SZA Is British Vogue’s December 2024 Cover Star

By Chioma Nnadi

So the first time I hear her voice is with 65,000 other people. In Hyde Park, for her sold-out headline BST show, the screens on stage start to glow. Bugs crawl across a fiery undergrowth on her big-screen backdrop, the animation descending lower below ground. In Tinker Bell-green fairy dust, cursive letters read “TDE presents”, then… “SZA”. Everyone screams. The 34-year-old floats out from under the stage on a teeny podium that rises up and up and up. Arms out, Christlike, she’s in full Dior Rasta – leotard, coat, boots, even a matching kneepad. Everyone has their phone out. People are waving. People are jumping. Everyone wants her attention. She holds theirs. She starts to sing.

Both bruised and assertive, the first track, “PSA”, is an unreleased song said to appear on one of the two feverishly anticipated projects she is said to be releasing this autumn: her third record, Lana, its date shrouded in uncertainty at the time of writing, and the long-awaited deluxe edition of her triple-platinum genre-bending sophomore album, SOS. Landing at the tail end of 2022, SOS debuted at No1 on the US Billboard 200 chart and stayed there for nine nonconsecutive weeks. SZA, born Solána Imani Rowe, became the first woman in almost seven years to achieve such a feat. Only two others can boast a similar recent record: Adele and Taylor Swift.

The album continues to be the top-selling record by a Black woman this year. Its nine nods made her the most nominated artist at the 2024 Grammys (she won three) and she beat Swift, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey to secure international artist of the year at the Brits, after performing four sold-out shows at The O2. SOS took her five years to release and she announced more than once that she would quit music as a result. Ctrl, her breakout studio debut (which recently made history as the longest-charting album by a woman ever, staying on the Billboard 200 for more than seven years, besting Swift’s 1989), was delayed for almost the same length of time, due to her whorling indecision over its tracks. While the strength and turbulence of her emotions almost cost her these runaway successes, they are also, in large part, responsible for them: her celestial sound traverses her insecurities, chronicling a naked thirst for a love that eludes her and all the mistreatment inflicted in its pursuit. With stark candour, she captures the mess of modern dating, striking a chord with a young generation of listeners, particularly women, making her a pioneer among a current wave of self-reflective, sensitive main pop girls. (SZA’s acting debut, in an upcoming comedy One of Them Days with Keke Palmer, out in January, is only set to cement that reputation.) Billie Eilish, ne plus ultra, tells me she has “been a fan of SZA since she put ‘Childs Play’ out. It was one of my biggest inspirations for so much of my music and I would reference it all the time,” she says of a decade-old track from SZA’s third EP, Z. “Watching her get the recognition that she deserved for so long has been so satisfying.”

In the UK, the day after her BST show, SZA is set to join another hall of fame: following Beyoncé as only the second Black woman to headline Glastonbury solo. But approaching a moment this major can feel like marching towards certain doom, SZA will later say: “Before I do something big and amazing, I can guarantee something unfair will occur. Calamity.” The UK press seem confused by her appointment, but then they also took issue with Jay-Z and Stormzy as headliners in the past – this, miserably, seems par for the course.

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The Story Behind SZA’s “Christmas Tree” Cover Look

By Alice Newbold

At 7am on the day of her Pyramid Stage show, we are at London’s Rosewood hotel, waiting for cars to take us to Worthy Farm. At 9am, her parents, tour manager and I are still in the courtyard. At this rate, she is not going to make her sound check. Her tour manager tries to charter us a helicopter – apparently some new passport laws in the UK complicate things. Cars finally arrive and me and him set out in a Mercedes somewhere behind her, passing Stonehenge and a SZA poster en route to Somerset. In between fielding frantic calls, he (a rakish white Australian corporate hippy type, with ice-blue eyes and a fluctuating accent) channels my ancestors, holding my hands while speaking African gibberish. We get a few hours rest at a hotel an hour away from the campsite before the show. I read a text that says SZA is taking an aura-altering baño blanco (a bath to cleanse negative energies) in between glam and wardrobe.

It’s the closing slot on Sunday night, when the most sensible Glasto attendees go home to beat the traffic (and those less so party even harder). As we walk to the broadcasting island opposite the Pyramid Stage, the crowd is full but less dense than the horde at the BST show. It’s a different energy – motley, paler, uncertain. When she starts, there are sound issues, distorting her voice when she sings and rendering her incomprehensible when she speaks. Half an hour in, it’s fixed. The show is beautiful. Her vocals soar. Her parents and publicist are dancing, smiling, cheering. The crowd is swaying, holding each other. It’s done. Backstage, her dancers and team loudly celebrate – there are Don Julio bottles and pizza boxes everywhere. Everyone is ecstatic. SZA is nowhere to be found.

You can still hear laughs and squeals outside the makeshift backstage office as her manager, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) label president Terrence Henderson Jr, better known as Punch, explains that SZA suffers from severe anxiety. “When you do a festival, it’s so much shared space… different crews, different teams, you don’t know who’s who.” On her own tour, she’ll “come out, mingle and talk to everybody. She’ll usually pull fans back. With a festival… she’ll usually get off stage and go straight to the hotel.”

Punch is the hardest to read during the show. “A lot of people say that,” he says, with a hint of a smile. It’s the 40-something Californian’s first time outside of America (“a culture shock”) and he wryly describes himself as “sometimes coach, sometimes friend, sometimes drill sergeant soldier, sometimes warden for the inmate, depending”. He calmly sent out a couple of texts to fix the technical issues. “Everything works itself out.” He’s happy. “You hit these marks every so often throughout your career and this was a huge one. It’s the biggest festival in the world…”

Punch and SZA met when she was going by her nickname, Sosa. The story goes that she and her friend were delivering merch to TDE after a Kendrick Lamar concert in 2011. Her friend had earphones in, lost in another world, blocking them all out. Punch asked what she was listening to. “It’s her. She sings,” he recounts. He asked to listen. “She was speaking from the gut, no filter. The real stuff that people be thinking, but be scared to say.” Two years later, joining a label of all rappers, SZA was TDE’s first woman signee.

To label-friends such as Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock, SZA became a “little sister”. Back then, the label operated out of owner Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith ’s house, so they would leave the studio and drink out of the fridge, chill on the sofa, order the “20 tacos for $10” deal from Cali chain Jack in the Box’s value menu. Lamar remembers meeting a “shy yet outgoing individual who was open for information”, he writes to me over email. “There was always a question about something.” Today, he says, “I recognise a more expressive SZA. The shy shit is completely out the window – to a degree, at least. She has the answers to some of the things she was curious about and is willing to tell it all in the most disruptive yet beautiful compositions this generation has ever heard.”

Having witnessed the whirlwind of her life, when we finally meet post Glastonbury for our interview, I am unfazed by the ever-changing logistics of SZA-land, by the hours ticking by. We’re going to Kew Gardens, which she has visited every day that she’s been in London. The seats in the Mercedes face each other, and her best friend and personal manager, Amber Wilson, and publicist, Theola Borden, sit opposite. I choose the seat to SZA’s side (I read somewhere that it’s less intimidating on first dates) so when she enters I see her hair first, shoulder-length big black ringlet waves. She’s already mid-flow, upset about the “horrific” Getty photos the BBC used of her, and edits an Instagram caption that is already posted, in between rolling a blunt. “I’m not talking about Glastonbury,” she states. “At all.”

Whenever she answers my questions, she glances but doesn’t fully face me. I worry. It feels a little like hate, until she interrupts herself: “I also chipped my tooth on the microphone at Hyde Park – please don’t look at my front teeth.” I do look, but don’t see anything. “Right here,” she says, pointing to the tiniest shaving. “I’m self-conscious about it because it’s my fucking front teeth, so I just needed to tell you before you notice it on your own. I would have assumed that every time you looked at me that you were looking at it if I didn’t tell you.”

Breezing past the gates at Kew, down manicured alleys where the crowd skews to retirement age, Amber and Theola trail somewhere behind us. While our conversation feels private, they’re just a raised voice away. When SZA and Amber catch wind of a special sweet smell in the air, they set about trying to locate the source, which leads them, at first, to a common lime or linden tree. Between June and July, the heart-shaped leaves hide white blossoms with such a pungent scent it gets bees punch-drunk, often found stupefied on the ground. On inspection, they decide this is not the fragrance they are searching for. We pass patches of lavender and reach the rose garden, where SZA sticks her nose deep inside scarlet, peachy and blush-tone petals, assessing, comparing and philosophising. Every now and then, Amber and her will yell, Marco Polo-style, about the smell getting stronger or weaker.

Up close, SZA has a gentle doe-like beauty, accentuated by e-girl make-up (eye highlight, nose contour), and enhanced, anime curves. She speaks with the same mellifluous copperplate cadence that she sings in – animated, pixieish and persuasive. It all makes for a quirky, highly magnetic charisma that disguises (but can’t hide) her extreme neuroticism.

An example? When I absent-mindedly pluck a flower off a tree (my bad), SZA instinctively reacts like I have just shot a dog in front of her. She apologises for her reaction in between laughing at herself. “I talk to everything. I talk to plants. I talk to energies… I try to greet them. I leave an offering.” At one point, looking at a purple flower, she holds herself back from weeping. “Nature just be naturing and we don’t even know why. It’s so weird, and so bizarre, and magical, and so great. It’s such a reminder: this shit is completely out of your control,” she explains, her eyes brimming with tears. “The weeds are doing their part. They’re part of the larger landscape. They don’t get to choose if they’re a fucking tulip or a tiger lily or a dandelion.”

As we walk, she tells two passersby, “You guys look fire,” who thank her and pay it back. As I turn to make mental notes of their appearance (one in a wheelchair, the other has blue hair; both wear tango colours), they are looking back too, eyes bright with amazement, mouthing: “Was that…” “That’s…” We skirt past crowds, where she walks with her head tilted low, arms folded, abruptly changing directions. “I think this girl’s filming me. We’ll go over here.” When we see a man pointing a camera in our direction, we change course again, except it turns out he was filming a stunning, towering pagoda. “I’m screaming,” says SZA, with a small giggle. “It always exposes the ego and vanity when you’re in historical [places] or beautiful nature and you’re like, ‘It’s clearly me.’ But that’s the psychosis of fame. It makes you so paranoid. You’re not even in touch with reality, because you’re so scared.”

She has never been able to reconcile the world in which she finds herself. “Every day I grapple with, ‘Am I done with music?’ Maybe I’m just not meant to be famous – I’m crashing and burning and behaving erratically. It’s not for me because I have so much anxiety. But why would God put me in this position if I wasn’t supposed to be doing this? So I just keep trying to rise to the occasion. But I’m also just like, ‘Please, the occasion is beating my ass.’”

When she started out, she had an “intimate” relationship with her supporters (“I’m trying so desperately to keep that”), so in every city she now tours she picks out select fans to come backstage after her show, adding them to group chats called her “A-Teams”, of which she has dozens. Another chat is with “day-one fan pages, [who] then became my friends. They keep me abreast of everything. I’ll be like, ‘Guys, should I delete this?’ They’ll be like, ‘No, you’re fine, but you should probably drop another version of that song because people want to hear that.’ They let me know so I don’t have to go look on the internet.”

She struggles with the impersonality of being “mass-consumed”: the pain of the paparazzi, the cruel comments, all those online narratives, persistent and untrue. She’s defensive, recalling those who pilloried her as a whisper artist who was unable to make hits, pigeonholed her in R&B or claimed she was only flirting with alt sounds, despite her first EPs being chockfull of electronic experiments, to say nothing of the endless online conjecture about her looks.

“She’s an emotional person,” reiterates her longtime stylist, Alejandra Hernandez. Often, SZA asks to be dressed as a mood (comfortable or ethereal or intellectual) rather than a specific look. “[Her style] is very similar to her music: a mix of so many different genres.” As “such a child of nature”, the through-line is pretty bohemian, which, thanks to Chemena Kamali’s new work at Chloé, is once again having a moment. While conceptions of the boho look are often Eurocentric, there has always been a Black hippy movement. Last December, SZA dropped six mooted, tone-setting cover images for Lana, styled by Hernandez, that speak to this free-spirited, spiritual style. In one image, leaves cover her naked body and hair (think postlapsarian Eve meets woodland nymph). While SZA loves Maison Margiela, Valentino and indie labels such as Ottolinger, she always comes back to vintage: old Tom Ford or Roberto Cavalli; polo rugbys, cargos and oversized Obama tees.

Today, she is wearing leggings under shorts and a camo-print jacket. Amber is in practically the same look. It wasn’t on purpose, just another example of their “unusual similarities”. During the car ride in, the two laughed nonstop as they swapped anecdotes, Amber only breaking her silence after SZA gave her the OK. “You can tell her the truth,” said SZA, gesturing to me. They first met at college orientation at Delaware State University in the late 2000s (SZA majored in marine biology; she dropped out in her final semester), a time they spent “doing regular young girl Sex and the City-driven things”. (Amber is reluctantly “a little Charlotte, even if I don’t want to be”. SZA is everything but: “a little Carrie, a little Samanthaah, a little Miranda”.)

SZA’s smile is big and unselfconscious when Amber is telling stories, her eyes crinkling shut with joy. Amber is her other half: “I really do have a deep belief that we’re a split atom or something.” They first connected over “being strange”, Amber says, getting choked up mid-story. “[SZA] didn’t necessarily fit in in high school, and I didn’t really fit in ever or have anybody to really relate to outside of my sister.” SZA agrees: “It’s the feeling of otherness in all situations. Sometimes it’s like a cold feeling of ‘we’re outside of this’. I don’t feel that I belong here, but somehow we belong with each other.”

SZA wants to start a family with Amber. “It’s sad. It’s like, if I don’t have a child in the next year or two, I might not. But I might have a kid any day – for real,” she says. “She’s the only person that I could have a child with at this point.” (Amber reverts to silence.) “I’ll just wear her down eventually. But who else would be a life partner? [Men] come and go, like the wind. They’re insane. Mentally unwell.”

Is it extra hard dating as a celebrity? “I try not to think about that, because I start to get nervous about dying alone and shit.” Her greatest love, who she was with for 11 years and also engaged to, has her blocked. He’s asked her to stop mentioning him at her shows. “I can’t even spiel about my experience? I’m in jail!” Regardless, “Despite his hatred for me, I would still trust him with my life. He’s one of the smartest people I know.” And where’s her heart now? “My current relationship? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I might just Tracee Ellis Ross it. She’s fine as hell and has no children and no man… that we know of, anyway. I love that for her and I might like that for me.”

Her parents give her pause on both fronts. Her mother is a “saint” and SZA worries that “I can’t be that mom for my kids.” Plus, “Seeing my parents love each other did something for me as a child. [My children] wouldn’t see that with me and Amber,” she says, before changing her mind. “But they would: we’d be affectionate. It’s not like I saw my parents doing it or making out. It would be just the way that my mom put her feet up in my dad’s lap when we watched a movie, how they brought each other things from their day, the way they listened. We do that.”

I have seen what she’s talking about: up in the private treehouse viewing spot at Hyde Park, her mother held her father and niece tightly, all three clearly emotional through “Blind”, her dad’s favourite song. “Every time I hear that song it brings tears to my eyes,” he tells me at Glastonbury, helping his wife into a cardigan. He’s so proud of SZA (or “sport”, as he used to call her). “Whatever she puts her mind to, she succeeds at it. Early on, I saw that but I had no idea it would come to this point – at this level, at this capacity, at this magnitude. It surprised all of us. I’m surprised but I’m not surprised. ” Are her bare-all lyrics ever hard to hear? “It just gives me another new insight into her – the way she thinks and where her mind is – so it’s an education for me.”

They weren’t always so open-minded. “Oh, man. I think my parents were mortified,” SZA says of them seeing the sexed-up shows. “At first. But now my parents are so chill.” Born in St Louis, Missouri, and raised in the suburbs of Maplewood, New Jersey, both of her parents are southerners: her Christian mother, Audrey Rowe, worked as an executive at the telecoms company AT&T, while her Muslim father, Abdul-Alim Mubarak-Rowe, was a video producer for CNN. As a preteen, SZA wore the hijab, until 9/11 made her a target for Islamophobia. Stopping “caused a lot of weird energy with my dad, because I started feeling so much shame and wanted to disassociate myself, because I just was already getting bullied for being a weird bitch”, she remembers of a childhood being the kid “no one wanted to hang out with”. She felt scared to speak up, cried a lot, loved fantasy and collected cicada wings. “I just felt so awkward.”

When SZA dropped out of college, she dove into “peak Adderall chaos”. She was bartending and sometimes dancing at strip clubs, selling grills for studio time, “trying to figure out” who she was. There were warrants out for her hopping trains and shoplifting (“But my record is expunged, so it doesn’t exist. I don’t do crime”). Her parents were furious. Growing up in their conservative household, they had “dictated how much TV I consumed – how much and what music I listened to. My parents were going through my room and throwing away CDs that I bought and love so much just to make sure I’m not consuming anything crazy.”

For all this, however, SZA is “grateful”. “I would have melted my soul if left to my own devices… For people that lack boundaries and struggle with self-control, it’s paramount. I was that child. And I’m that adult where I struggle with boundaries. I need parameters.”

Lately, SZA’s been plagued by mysterious allergies, ailments and autoimmune issues. Not long ago, her hair was falling out and her hands were peeling. “My nail beds were separating from my fingers and coming off. It was so gross.” Only medication – dexamethasone, Plaquenil, prednisone – has provided temporary relief on tour. Listing her medicines, the specificity feels like a protective defence against loud corners of the internet that have repeatedly accused her of lying over anything that sounds out of the ordinary or contradictory. (Such scandals include saying she doesn’t like birthday cake, while a video exists of her eating one presented to her… Gotcha!) It’s not hard to imagine it as part of the kind of constant pressure that could make you ill in the first place.

SZA has a tendency to seesaw between conflicting statements and sentiments. She cycles through her thoughts in the same stream of consciousness of her lyrics, hate and love all mixed together. Talking about her BBL (Brazilian butt lift), she says: “I’m so mad I did that shit.” Somewhere around the start of 2022, she had been going to the gym, rapidly developing muscle, but her butt was slower to grow. After she had the procedure, “I gained all this weight from being immobile while recovering and trying to preserve the fat. It was just so stupid. But who gives a fuck? You got a BBL, you realise you didn’t need the shit. It doesn’t matter. I’ll do a whole bunch more shit just like it if I want to before I’m fucking dead because this body is temporary. It just wasn’t super necessary – I have other shit that I need to work on about myself… I need to get my fucking mental health together… Not to say you can’t do those things simultaneously, just, for me, I realise wherever you go, there you’ll be. But I love my butt. Don’t get me wrong. My booty look nice. And I’m grateful that it looks pretty much… I don’t know, sometimes natural, but I don’t even care. It’s something that I wanted. I’m enjoying it. I love shaking it.”

Through it all, she has her 66 million monthly listeners on Spotify who identify with these oscillating, multidimensional feelings. “Her vulnerability through her music is brave and inspiring,” says Kendrick Lamar of SZA, before summarising.“She’s a reminder of what the human experience looks like: a roller-coaster of emotions. And that’s OK. We are alive.”

Although she said she wouldn’t, SZA brings Glastonbury up herself: “I just felt like nothing I could do would be enough for Glastonbury, no matter what I did,” she says, quietly. “It scared me. I was like, well, I wish I wasn’t doing it, but I couldn’t walk away from it…” Hers came with a pressure no other headliner had to shoulder that summer. “I want to be the second Black woman in history, but then it’s such a fucking tall order. It’s like, no matter what you do here, you will be subject to criticism. Because of who you are. But that’s life. That’s life, you know?” While she usually likes to zone in on audience members’ faces, at Glastonbury SZA couldn’t see anyone. “I’m like, I’m freaked out right now. I’m scared. I feel like I’m drowning on stage and I feel like I’m failing.” Until, through the darkness, came a sign: “Maferefún. I love you,” which, for her, calls to mind the Yoruba and Santería water deity Yemaya. “It was a reminder that your guardians are with you. Everyone’s here. Even beyond. Keep going.”

Lately, the new music she’s been recording for Lana has felt like a welcome shift. “I think I am making music from a more beautiful place. From a more possible place versus a more angsty place,” she says. “I’m not identifying with my brokenness. It’s not my identity. It’s shit that happened to me. Yeah, I experienced cruelty. I have to put it down at some point. Piece by piece, my music is shifting because of that, the lighter I get.”

While she no longer does talk therapy or hypnotherapy (“I gotta fix the root. I can’t trick myself into doing better”), she is finding yoga and meditation transformative. “You don’t have to imagine anything is happening to you. In that weird stillness, something arrives at you every time.” Some days, long after, she cries. Others, she feels like she’s levitating. Sometimes nothing happens, but she’ll notice later that she didn’t react to a rude remark. It makes her sit with herself, calms her down, reminds her to just be, to breathe.

“Even the commentary, it’s like, you just gotta let that happen. That’s part of it. That’s part of this moment in time.” She turns to breathe in the air at Kew once more. “Smells nice again.” And then she’s off, weaving past some shrubs to a stately tree in full bloom to examine it more closely, finding tiny bunches of pale, white-yellow flowers peeking through the leaves. It was a lime tree after all.

Cover look: Draped jersey minidress, Balenciaga. Tights, Wolford. White-gold, black-spinel and diamond earrings and white-gold and pavé-diamond ring (on left hand), Van Cleef & Arpels. Other ring, SZA’s own. Hair: Lacy Redway. Make-up: Deanna Paley. Nails: Eri Ishizu. Set design: James Rene. Movement director: Stephen Galloway. Production: Tightrope Production. Digital artwork: Touch Digital