SZA has been talking about Glastonbury and the Sunday night headline performance that didn’t really go to plan.
You may recall that the St Louis-born singer headlined the Pyramid stage on the Sunday night this year – only the second black female solo artist to do so after Beyonce in 2011. However, she drew less of a crowd than fellow headliners Dua Lipa and Coldplay and suffered a series of sound problems; at times her vocals were so muffled it sounded like she was singing into tissue paper.
In an interview in the new edition of British Vogue, SZA recalled the experience as somewhat traumatic. "I'm like, I'm freaked out right now. I'm scared. I feel like I'm drowning on stage and I feel like I'm failing.”
The singer, whose real name is Solana Rowe, admitted she had been suffering from anxiety even prior to her performance. It didn’t help that from the get-go her presence on the bill had been criticised – many critics felt that she was a ‘big enough name’, or was ‘too mainstream’. "I just felt like nothing I could do would be enough for Glastonbury, no matter what I did," she stated. "It scared me. I was like, well, I wish I wasn't doing it, but I couldn't walk away from it…”
"I want to be the second Black woman in history, but then it's such a f**king tall order. It's like, no matter what you do here, you will be subject to criticism. Because of who you are. But that's life."
The singer is gearing up for the release of her third album, titled Lana, after the nickname she acquired as a teenager. The story goes that she was planning to get a tattoo of her name but at $10 per letter and only having $40 on her, opted to merely get the last four letters done. The album has been trailed for some time, but as yet there has been confirmed release date.
In the same Vogue interview, Rowe revealed how she often wonders what she’s doing in the music industry: "Maybe I'm just not meant to be famous,” she said. “I'm crashing and burning and behaving erratically. It's not for me because I have so much anxiety. But why would God put me in this position if I wasn't supposed to be doing this? So I just keep trying to rise to the occasion. But I'm also just like, 'Please, the occasion is beating my a*s.'"
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