PHOTO CREDIT: Cara Stricker for FADER
this late in the year but, on Christmas Day, SZA (Solána Rowe) put out Good Days! I am going to get to the song itself and review it in a bit but, before moving on, I wanted to mention SZA and give us some background – and also shines a spotlight on her debut album of 2017, Ctrl. If you are new to the mighty SZA, then this interview/feature from FADER from 2018 provides some nice biography and illustration:
“If her path to Ctrl was somewhat unexpected and winding, it’s appropriate that the time before it was as well. SZA was born Solána Imani Rowe in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up the daughter of an executive producer at CNN (her father) and an AT&T executive (her mother) in the affluent suburb of Maplewood, New Jersey. Though her parents practiced different religions — her father is Muslim and her mother a Christian — she was raised Muslim and attended a Muslim prep school. She was a gymnast for 13 years and, in high school, also a cheerleader, though her other extracurricular activities were limited. She wasn’t allowed to watch TV or listen to the radio; her music world was limited to whatever her father enjoyed, namely jazz classics from Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.
After attending three different colleges, where she studied marine biology and ultimately dropped out, SZA took a succession of short-lived jobs including bartending and working at Sephora. When I ask if she lived at home during that time her voice is firm: “No. Hell, no,” she insists. “Once I started getting bread, I just lived anywhere else but home. And if I didn’t have bread, I would rather, like, just couch-to-couch. My parents didn’t fuck with the way I was moving, so I didn’t really have an option.”
In 2011, she became acquainted with Top Dawg Entertainment, meeting label co-president Terrence “Punch” Henderson at a Kendrick Lamar show where she was distributing merchandise for a clothing label. She stayed in touch with Punch as she began recording music, at first with her brother Daniel, a rapper who goes by MNHATTN, and later by “snatching songs off SoundCloud” and recording over the stolen beats and arrangements. It was all “hella casual,” she says.
Eventually came the release of two EPs: 2012’s See.SZA.Run and S, which she released independently in April 2013. Four months later, it was announced she’d signed with TDE. Her first studio EP, Z, followed in April 2014. In between working on her own projects, she became an in-demand songwriter, creating hits for Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Maroon 5. The plan was to release her proper debut, then tilted A, in mid-2016. She told Entertainment Weekly in May of that year that the project would be out “while everyone is still in a bathing suit.” Her prediction would be off by about a year”.
