Source: Mike Coppola, Sarah Morris / Getty
Every song that SZA recorded for her latest album, SOS, didn’t make the cut. It turns out that the TDE songbird has five or six songs that she recorded with her good girlfriend Lizzo sitting in the vault. The “Truth Hurts” singer also lended her voice to background vocals on the “F2F” track.
“We just have so much fun together,” SZA said on Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast. “And I feel like she gets me. She’s another person who has hella [wide] music tastes and doesn’t fit in anybody’s box of anything. She makes it seem like she doesn’t even care, like she just does whatever she wants. And I just love being with her, just as a friend and hanging out. So whenever she comes to a studio, I just feel like, ‘Let’s drop into some bull****.’”
Producer Carter Lang said while they were in the studio, both singers took turns laying verses on “F2F.” He said this helped SZA figure out what to do with the indie rock track.
They were putting some energy into it,” he says. “That was the thing that I feel sparked SZA really taking it into her own world and figuring out how it can be part of her story in an authentic way and not like, ‘Hey, I just did a rock joint.’”
SZA Was Prepared To Go Ghost If Her Album Didn’t Do Well
After she dropped the 23-track effort, the 33-year-old singer was prepared to go into hiding. She had planned to go ghost if the album flopped. “And then part of me was just like, I just wanna get it over with,” she said about releasing the album.
“I wanna meet my own fate. If n***** hate it, then great. I can never do music again. And I told my engineer, we’ll move to India, and we’ll live on an ashram, and we’ll take a vow of silence, and that’s it… And it is also really scary that it didn’t go that way because I’m like, now what do I do? And what does this actually mean and when do the tides turn? When does everyone decide that they hate me again or that this sucks?”
SOS turned out to be SZA’s first number one album. According to Billboard, SOS sold 318,000 equivalent album units and 309,500 SEA units which equals 404.58 million on-demand official streams.
