Your favorite artist’s favorite artist: How SZA went from cult star to pop superstar
LOS ANGELES — As the sun sets on a balmy February afternoon in West Hollywood, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter known as SZA has just wrapped her second photo shoot of the day, inside a historic three-story house off Sunset Boulevard. She wears rainbow chakra beads around her neck and rhinestones on her cheeks; sinking into an antique armchair, she details her weekly agenda in spurts, as if releasing a long-repressed sigh through a pressure valve. She's recovering from a carousel of winter illnesses: tonsillitis, then a respiratory infection, followed by a sinus infection.
"And I still gotta put in 30 minutes on the treadmill!" she says.
With more than six years between the release of her first and her most recent album, SZA, 33, is making up for lost time. Her arena tour, in support of the chart-topping LP "SOS," begins in two weeks; the 17-show run marks her first proper North American tour since 2018. After our interview, she will fly to Delaware for 10 days of rehearsals. She describes the stage show as a "Cinderella moment where there's weird, ethereal, mystical, soft things," but with a "hardcore" edge.
"There might be a little blood," she adds with a grin.
Distinguished by SZA's biting candor around love, sex and other social entanglements,
