Photo Credit: ExtraTV
R&B singer-songwriter SZA opens up about her complicated relationship with fame in an interview with Extra, alongside Issa Rae and Keke Palmer.
SZA says she didn’t know what she was signing up for when she ascended to astronomic superstardom. For the four-time Grammy winner, even after a decade in the spotlight, fame is still a foreign concept. That’s the prevailing sentiment in her candid conversation with Extra, alongside actors Issa Rae and Keke Palmer.
“Some people are very well acclimated in being perceived and also have a different mechanism to approach that,” said the R&B star, whose real name is Solana Imani Rowe. “Keke has this crazy network of a mechanism where it’s like, everything just kind of flows, even when the cameras are on.” But it’s not like that for her, she explains.
“I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t know what the hell is going on,” SZA continued. “I didn’t grow up famous, I grew up in the ‘burbs, I went to regular school, went to regular college, did regular odd jobs until everything popped off.”
“I’ve never been examined in this way,” she explained. “I get just a comfortability with letting my shoulders down and knowing that I’m not in danger just because I’m being perceived by people that I don’t know.”
Keke Palmer agreed that fame was “weird,” and SZA doubled down that people often assume she is more at ease with it than she actually is. Especially when people believe the fame is what she signed up for in the first place.
“They’ll be like, ‘That’s what you signed up for,’ and then I’m like, ‘I didn’t even know what I was signing up for, actually,’” she said. “I just made a couple songs, and I was grateful that they were liked, and then I kept going.”
Despite how weird fame might still feel to her, SZA shows no signs of slowing down. Her latest album, SOS Deluxe: Lana, released on December 20, follows the immense success of SOS, which spent multiple weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The album returned to the No. 1 spot in December after 22 months, largely due to the hype generated by the deluxe reissue.
SZA has also expressed interest in creating two children’s albums, as a means to channel her creativity outside of mainstream music.