The Story of SZA: From Ghostwriter to World Star

SZA is one of America’s favorite singers because of amazing raw vocals and the intensity of her lyrics. At some point, she had everybody daydreaming about killing their exes with her song, Kill Bill. When she released the remix with Doja Cat, she had people writing think pieces about who had the better verse on the song. In fact, her fanbase came up with a name for her music language, Szalese. But people mostly ever talk about her in a musical capacity, forgetting she had a whole life before getting on the global stage. She had a career as a ghostwriter for some of your favorite artists and here is how she went from that to the SZA we know now.

SZA, whose real name is Solana Imani Rowe was born on November 8, 1989 and was raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. When you discover how many years she spent underground, struggling to build her career, you would assume it’s because she didn’t come from a rich family and wasn’t privileged enough. However, that's quite the contrary. Her father was an executive producer at CNN and her mother worked as an executive at AT&T. The major issue she had growing up was the conflicting religion her parents practiced with her mother being a Christian and her father being a Muslim. However, it was still not that big of a problem because she also practiced Islam.