SZA on the success of ‘SOS’: “I didn’t think I’d be Number One at all”
Written by ABC Audio. All rights reserved. on October 4, 2023
SZA‘s SOS album has broken records previously held by Beyoncé, Janet Jackson, Adele, Usher and Whitney Houston, and it was all to her surprise. When she released the project, she didn’t think she had a chart-topper on her hands.
“I didn’t think I’d be Number One at all,” she says in her cover story for Rolling Stone. “I thought Taylor [Swift] was going to dust me. I don’t know what n***** wanna hear from me. I never know when things are going to be popular. I never know what songs people are going to attach to.”
Despite the lack of knowledge of what songs or albums may be a hit, SZA has ideas and she’s adamant about them. One idea was releasing the song “DTM,” which she teased in the “Snooze” music video, as a song on the deluxe edition of SOS. She says it’s the first song she remembers writing in the midst of a romance with someone she likes.
Of the deluxe, SZA says it will be called Lana, a name she’s now going by. It will include 10 new tracks, in addition to the previous SOS cuts, and she’s planning to drop it this fall.
Elsewhere in her cover story, SZA discusses her loss at the 2018 Grammys, her thoughts on failure and even the accusations against her friend Lizzo.
“Based on the values and the energy that I see in my friend, I just really think that she’s a beautiful person, and I just really pray that everybody recovers from this because everybody deserves to heal and feel safe and feel loved,” she says of the allegations Lizzo’s former dancers have made against the singer. “I just really hope that everybody ends up feeling like that when this is all said and done. Because that’s the bottom line.”
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