SZA: The S.O.S Album

    Solána Imani Rowe (SZA) is a four-time Grammy Award-winning artist with groundbreaking advances in the R&B industry in a short amount of time. She was born on November 8, 1990, in St. Louis. She grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey where her father was determined to raise his children as Orthodox Muslim. SZA attended a Muslim preparatory school and set rules for no television or radio. Her exposure to music would come from her dad’s collection of jazz music, her half-sister’s collection of music, and her gymnastics teammate’s iPod. SZA briefly attended Delaware State University studying marine biology while working as a bartender at nearby clubs. She would drop out and attend the Fashion Institute of Technology for one summer before her musical career changed her life. 

Her sophomore album SOS debuted at No. 1 Billboard 200 in December 2022 spending 22 weeks in the top spot. The most popular song being “Kill Bill” which became SZA’s first No. 1 at the Billboard 100. Her lyricism is untouched as she explores love, lust, loss, and self-awareness. These are constant emergent themes throughout the album but it tells a story of self-improvement and describes how we can only save ourselves and protect our peace and happiness. 

    

    

SZA has a different approach to the creative process and cannot “do it on command.” She has not fully understood her mechanisms that she needs to create music. It all happens on “accident” and she is trying to be more intentional with her creativity so she can do it on command. She finds the creative process “annoying" with its steps of waiting for it, surrendering to it, and allowing it. I wonder if trying to force herself to change her ways of thinking and creating will impact the quality of her music. I fear forcing the creative process will make the music less genuine and take the joy out of the music. Currently, she claims that for her to create music the beat needs to be playing, she has to stand at the mic, and hope creativity takes over. Sometimes it does not happen but when it does she explains it as her subconscious taking over and starts writing lyrics. She describes her creative process as “channel drawing” where she is not actively processing what she is creating but it works. 

Another creative process SZA partakes in is the idea of incubation. Incubation is where you take time away from the problem you are trying to solve which leads you to solving the original problem as your subconscious helps you. An interesting thing to note about SZA’s incubation is that she will create hit songs while in incubation. She describes her creative process of SOS and some nights she would hit a standstill on a song that she was working on and in order to take a break or go into incubation she requested her producer put on a random beat. She calls the period of incubation as “palate cleansing.” SZA wrote some of her biggest hits during this incubation period as she claims songs like “Kill Bill” and “Blind” were palate cleansers. She finds it upsetting when those hit songs become more viral than the songs she originally wrote and put a lot of effort into. 

SZA’s creative process connects to my focus book Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan as they talk about Cave’s creative process as a songwriter. Cave says you only need “ten beautiful and breath-taking accidents to make up a record.” This is parallel to SZA’s work on her SOS album as she came in with over 100 songs written and ended up with only 23. She says there are a lot of songs that were very close to making the album but will go on the deluxe version of the album. The accidents Cave is talking about also relates to SZA’s “accidental” hits she created while in incubation. Both Cave and SZA have an improvisation approach to the creative process where they allow their subconscious to take control. Cave describes it as not having “any real control over the creative process when you start improvising in a studio.” SZA would relate to this which is why as mentioned earlier she is trying to change her creative process because this style of guided improvisation is unpredictable and inefficient to SZA. 

Another commonality SZA and Cave share in the creative process is the idea of loss and how it appears in their work. Cave lost his son Arthur shortly after releasing his album and before releasing his 2019 album Ghosteen which has some of his grief embedded in the work as it permanently changed his life. Many songs on SZA’s SOS album also deal with the loss of her fiance as they split early on in her career and she was dependent on him and was told she couldn’t be anything without him. She went into music to prove him wrong. SOS is reflective of this loss as there are many songs about the breakup which had deeply affected her creativity. Cave put it best as, “we are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss.” Many people have different ways of expressing their grief and these two singer/songwriters took to music to express that pain.

 

Sources: 

Apple Music. “Behind SZA’s ‘SOS’ Album and Tour | Apple Music Live.” YouTube, 13 Dec. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc0vRDh1ECA.

Eleanor. “Breaking Down the Story Within the Album ‘SOS’ by ‘SZA’ - Top Pop Tracks.” Top Pop Tracks, 1 Dec. 2023, toppoptracks.com/albums/breaking-down-the-story-within-the-album-sos-by-sza.

Most Requested Live. “SZA Shares Writing Process, Inspirations, and How Travis Scott’s Verse Came Back at the LAST Second.” YouTube, 8 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYHAW270Zrg.

Piccotti, Tyler. “SZA.” Biography, 5 Feb. 2024, www.biography.com/musicians/a57628214/sza.