Music: Love Supreme

ARMED WITH A NEVER-SAY-DIE AT TITUDE AND A FLUTE, SINGER-RAPPER LIZZO IS EMBRACING HER DEMONS AND BARING HER SOUL

- Allison Takeda, Elle McClure, Hannah James

It’s hard to imagine a world in which Lizzo is not a musical force, a world in which songs like “Juice” and “Boys” are not on a constant loop in our heads and our earbuds. In that world, most of us wouldn’t know the unadulterated joy of watching the singer-rapper extraordinaire twerk on-stage while casually slaying a flute solo. It seems unfathomable now, and yet that world very nearly existed.

In 2017, on the day she dropped her now-massive sleeper hit “Truth Hurts”, Lizzo felt so demoralized, both by the industry and my life in general, that she texted the song’s producer to say she was thinking about quitting. She was tired of putting her blood, sweat and literal tears into music most people would never hear. “I just felt like I was throwing music into the world and not even making a splash,” she says during a rare (and brief) break from her current tour. “A tree was falling in the forest and not making a sound, you know? I was crying in my room all day. I said, ‘If I stop making music now, nobody would fucking care.’” Her producer showed up at her apartment to give her a pep talk, and to tell her that even if her music didn’t feel important to the world, at least it was important to them. “I just made the decision to keep going as an artist,” Lizzo recalls. “And I’m so grateful I did, but it was by the skin of my teeth.”