SZA is opening up about the reason she started making music in the first place, revealing that she wanted to prove herself to her ex-fiancé.
Source: River Callaway / Getty
The singer recently sat down with Zane Lowe for an Apple Music interview, where she talked all about her struggles with fame and how her songstress journey began.
While discussing how she first delved into singing and songwriting, the artist–full name Solána Imani Rowe–admitted that her career began as a way to prove her worth to a former love interest.
“When I started making music, it was to my ex-fiancé because he was paying for everything,” she said during the interview. “My food, my clothes, where I lived. And he was like eight years my senior.”
Solána continued, “I was so codependent and he was so talented. His ex-girlfriends were all lawyers, businesswomen, and artists…and I’m a college dropout, I was still bartending at the strip club. I felt like I lacked value.”
Elsewhere in her interview, SZA also discussed how she recently had an epiphany that fame is “not normal.”
“I realized, as of recent, that a lot of this shit is not normal,” she told Lowe. “And I didn’t know how to process that experience. And I was having a lot of lashing out, a lot of frustration. There are a lot of opinions, a lot of entitlement to your space, a lot of entitlement to your time, a lot of expectation, and no one is understanding.”
The “Broken Clocks” singer went on to confess that these feelings toward fame have made her feel “on edge and not a kind person.” She also said that she feels anxiety over how she’s perceived “in a vacuum, in your most high-pressure moment,” as opposed to her authentic self.
You can check out her full conversation with Zane Lowe down below:
