Lizzo has opened up about the emotional support she received from SZA after her latest album, BITCH, didn’t perform as well on the charts as she had hoped.
Speaking with Zachary Hourihane for Proto Pop, the singer reflected on the album’s first-week sales and admitted the outcome took an emotional toll on her.
“I think, right now, dropping the album, I took it to heart really, really heavily,” she said around the 53-minute mark of the interview. “I hurt my own feelings. I was really stressed, and was really sad for a few days because I was just like, wait a minute, this is some of my best stuff.”
She went on to explain that she had to accept how much both the music industry and her relationship with listeners have changed over the past few years.
“I had to come to terms with the fact that not only is the music industry different in the last three years…my relationship and my connection musically with the world, I had to mourn that,” she added.
Lizzo went on to explain that she first realized something was off a few weeks before BITCH was released, when she checked the album’s presave and preorder numbers. Worried about its performance, she took matters into her own hands by putting up posters herself and ramping up the album’s promotion.
“I had all of these high hopes, I think, for what we’d do the first week, and it didn’t match,” Lizzo admitted. “I was so excited because I met my pre-save goal and I met all of that, and then it dropped, and I was like, Oh, this is not what I thought it would be.”
The disappointing first-week results hit her hard. Lizzo said she briefly tied her self-worth to the album’s sales before SZA reached out with words of encouragement.
“There were 24 hours of my life that I based my success, and my worth, on a number — and I think that was soul crushing,” Lizzo explained. “Thank god for Solana (SZA’s real name). SZA called me and was like, ‘Hey, you’re on my mind!'”
“I was like (mimicking crying), ‘Am I a failure?’ She was like, ‘Oh my God, no!'” Lizzo recalled. “She was so sweet, and I meditated and prayed on it. I was, like, this is why I don’t judge myself and my success, or impact, on numbers because it’s soul-crushing if you do.”
BITCH sold 2,650 copies in its opening week and did not make the Billboard 200 chart. By comparison, Lizzo’s previous album, Special, debuted in 2022, peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and moved 69,000 units during its first week.
