In 2019, it’s hard to imagine a world in which Lizzo is not a musical force, a world in which bops 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- flutist extraordinaire twerk onstage while casually slaying a flute solo. It seems unfathomable now, and yet that world very nearly existed. Back in 2017, on the day she dropped her now-massive sleeper hit “Truth Hurts,” Lizzo felt so demoralized, both by the industry and by 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 recounts 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 the two of them. “So 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.”
Her perseverance soon paid off. In the two years since that fateful day, Lizzo has become a bonafide breakout star. Everything she does now earns attention, whether she’s strutting the Met Gala red carpet in head-to-toe pink or posting videos of herself twerking on Instagram. In April, she made her Coachella debut and released her debut album on Atlantic Records, Cuz I Love You. Two months later, at the 2019 BET Awards, she delivered a rollicking, knockout performance of “Truth Hurts,” complete with backup dancers, a wedding cake–themed set, and a flute solo that made Rihanna stand up and cheer. She also landed a major beauty campaign with Urban Decay; filmed a role in Hustlers with Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B; hit the fifth spot on Billboard’s Top 100 chart; and earned two 2019 MTV Video Music Award nominations, including Best New Artist. To say she’s having a moment would be an understatement—she’s having the moment.
But for Lizzo, success is not necessarily measured by chart positions or streaming numbers or awards shows. It’s about making the music she wants to make, and getting it to the people who need to hear it. “If my next album doesn’t do anything like this [one], and this was just a one-time thing, I’m going to be grateful. And I’m also gonna have a fan base that I can tour on. I’ve been touring for a long time—why would that stop? I’m gonna continue to do that forever.”
Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, Lizzo, now 31, fell in love with music at a young age. As early as third grade, she started forming girl groups and writing pop songs with her friends. Then, in fifth grade, after she and her family moved to Houston, she picked up the flute in her school’s marching band, and she’s been playing ever since. (Her instrument—which she named Sasha Flute, after Beyoncé’s alter ego Sasha Fierce—even has its own Instagram account, @sashabefluting.)
She went on to study music performance at the University of Houston before moving to Minneapolis, where she spent some of the most formative years of her early career. It was there that she began making a name for herself as a member of the all-female rap/R&B groups The Chalice and GRRRL PRTY. It was also there that she and her Chalice bandmate Sophia Eris met and collaborated with Prince on the song “Boy Trouble,” on his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum.
“I miss those days,” Lizzo says, a little wistfully, of her time in Minnesota. “Not just when Prince was physically with us, but how it felt to be young and excited about music, and life, and not knowing what was next, and not having money but manifesting our dreams. There’s a spirit of adventure that I took away from that—to never let life and music not feel adventurous, and to always push yourself and believe in the magic you’re creating.”
A big part of pushing herself was breaking out on her own. Growing up, Lizzo had always been more comfortable performing as part of a group. “I had an insecurity about what a star looks like, or what a front-person looks like. I felt like I was inadequate; I felt like I wasn’t enough; I felt like people didn’t want to look at me and listen to what I had to say,” she says. Even now, at a point in her career where crowds literally chant her name between songs in a live set, she feels anxious when she’s alone onstage. The one thing about going solo that came easily, however, was the writing. “I felt like I had so much to say, so much on my chest,” she says of finally telling her own story. Her Lizzobangers dropped in 2013, followed by Big GRRRL Small World in 2015 and Coconut Oil, her Atlantic Records debut EP, in 2016. All three were well-reviewed; Coconut Oil even climbed onto the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. But she wasn’t yet the worldwide sensation we know now.
Then came Cuz I Love You, a genre-defying album that could double as both the female-empowerment playlist for your next girls’ night out and the cathartic soundtrack to your next breakup. “My songs feel happy, but they come from a sad or frustrated place,” she says. “My songs are always the silver lining or the ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ moments.” That’s especially true of “Soulmate,” “Truth Hurts,” and “Crybaby,” all three of which she either wrote or recorded through tears. “Those songs are actual anecdotes, like real stories about real moments in time. ‘Pull this car over, babe’—that is something that happened to me. ‘New man on the Minnesota Vikings’—that happened to me. ‘Old me used to love a Gemini’—that happened!”
Letting herself be that exposed and vulnerable wasn’t always easy. “I was the worst communicator, emotionally, when I was younger,” she explains. “I would stop talking to my family; I would stop talking to my friends. I would go deeper and deeper into that dark place, and the deeper I went, the harder it was to reach out of it.” It took her a lot of time and effort to change that, but now she prides herself on being vocal about how she feels. She even opened up about her mental well-being on Instagram back in June. “I’m depressed and there’s no one I can talk to because there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Life hurts,” she wrote. Her fans quickly flooded the comments with messages of love and support, thanking her for speaking up and letting her know she wasn’t alone. The next day, she returned: “I learned in the last 24 hours that being emotionally honest can save your life. Reaching out may be hard, but as soon as I did it, I was immediately covered in love.”
Lizzo Takes Over Spotify's TGIF Playlist
Reflecting on that a few weeks later, she says that learning how to communicate her feelings has been “revolutionary” in her life. “You realize that people truly care about you and they’ll help you, and they don’t mind helping you.” Now when she feels down, she tells someone (or a lot of someones). “Being in those places is inevitable for me; I’m going to end up there again,” she adds. “But the fact that I’m prepared now to go to those places—and I have a toolbox, and I know I can pull myself out—is really helpful to me in my mental health journey.”
Also helpful: regular self-care, which goes hand in hand with her message of self-love. She’s become something of an icon for the latter, but as with her success as an artist, those feelings of confidence and empowerment are hard-earned. “I take self-love very seriously. And I take it seriously because when I was younger, I wanted to change everything about myself,” she says. “I didn’t love who I was. And the reason I didn’t love who I was is because I was told I wasn’t lovable by the media, by [people at] school, by not seeing myself in beauty ads, by not seeing myself in television...by lack of representation. My self-hatred got so bad that I was fantasizing about being other people. But you can’t live your life trying to be somebody else. What’s the point?”
These days, Lizzo is happy to live life as herself. She’s busy touring and working on new music for 2020, but also trying to take time to enjoy her success so far. On the road, that means being present in each moment as it happens. So when she’s onstage and a crowd is chanting her name, for example, she can feel every syllable, every voice, coursing through her body. “I don’t need an encore chant after every song, even though they do that sometimes. But when it does happen, I open my arms to receive it, because it’s happening for a reason, and I’m so grateful for it.”
Styled by Anna Trevelyan; hair by Shelby Swain for GHD; makeup by Alexx Mayo at the Only Agency; manicure by Joanna Newbold at Terri Manduca Agency; set design by Kei Yoshino at Bryant Artists; produced by Noir Productions.
This article will appear in the October 2019 issue ofELLE, on newsstands September 26.
