When Solána Rowe’s debut album Ctrl finally dropped, to universal acclaim, in June 2017, stellar reviews quickly turned into sales: by March this year, the album was certified platinum. With album sales came an international tour, which has seen Rowe traverse time zones the way most of us do subway stations on a morning commute. Vogue had two private audiences with the 27-year-old between gigs in two different continents. First stop was New York for a photoshoot in a Greenpoint loft, before she sat down with us in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to bring us up to speed.
Read more: Why Lauryn Hill Waited Until Now To Front Her First Fashion Campaign
When we speak, Rowe, whom you will more likely know by her pseudonym SZA (pronounced scissor), is wearing her “Lara Croft Tomb Raider shit” – cargo pants, a “tight-ass crop top” and safari hat, having just returned from a five-mile hike (her favourite activity) through the ancient Taman Negara jungle (environmental science is a long-time passion). It’s August, and Rowe has plans to travel as much as possible – not a vacation, she stresses, because there is “a lot of work to do”. Instead, her ambition is to glean everything she can from her adventures and take steps to be her “best self – as an artist, a woman, a human being”, so in turn she can “regurgitate it out into some wax that makes sense”.
Given Rowe’s influence on the music industry over the past two years, whatever she comes up with is likely to continue pushing boundaries. Her impact has been so profound, it’s hard to imagine what an R&B playlist would sound like without her now. There have, of course, been the high-profile collaborations – with Childish Gambino (Donald Glover’s stage name) on his number-one hit “This is America” and Kendrick Lamar on the song “All The Stars” for the Black Panther soundtrack, as well as co-writing credits on “Feeling Myself” by Nicki Minaj featuring Beyoncé and “Consideration”, the opening single for Rihanna’s album Anti. But what Rowe has achieved as a solo artist is equally trailblazng. Through her unflinchingly honest lyrics, she is bringing a new level of transparency to the genre.
Read more: 30 Songs To Get You In The Mood For Summer
Rowe’s candour is perhaps what has chimed most deeply with her audience – her songs lay bare her own vulnerabilities, desires and emotions as she traces the experiences that have forged her identity. From talking about not shaving her legs in “Drew Barrymore” to admitting feelings of inadequacy in “Supermodel”, Ctrl plays out like a diary, with no subject off the table. After all, she says, “the black experience, the American experience, the human experience, is multifaceted and there are many avenues to be explored.”
A music industry without Rowe, though, was a very near eventuality. When it came to recording Ctrl, she was so wracked with anxiety and self-doubt that the initial release had to be delayed and she threatened to quit music altogether. Thankfully, her record label coaxed her hard drive out of her grasp and put its contents into production, so she couldn’t keep titivating the tracks.
Read more: Radhika Nair's Party Playlist
It’s only been six years since Rowe started recording mix tapes in a makeshift basement studio, a blanket in place of actual soundproofing, with her “homeboy”, producer Matt Cody. Growing up in leafy, middle-class Maplewood, New Jersey, Rowe – the daughter of a Catholic, Pan-Africanist mother and orthodox Sunni Muslim father – was raised on a musical diet of John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. She loves Coltrane for his “emotive and prayerful” quality. “I can’t tell if it’s sad or not,” she says. She could, of course, be describing her own music – that duality is what inspired Donald Glover to cast Rowe in “This is America”. “She always feels very powerful, but vulnerable, to me,” he explains. “I wanted that feeling in the piece.”
A friend of Rowe’s, much to her horror, played those early basement recordings to Top Dawg Entertainment’s president, Terrence “Punch” Henderson. He soon signed her and she joined the ranks of Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q. With such a rapid ascent, it’s perhaps unsurprising she was anxious about Ctrl. But for the purported second album, there’s no evidence of any uncertainty this time round. “I've grown up and realised what I need,” she says in her velvety voice. “I made my first song for the second album in London actually, and that was pretty cool.”
Read more: The Female Festival Headliners To Watch In 2018
Rowe was in the British capital last month to perform at Lovebox – the festival’s only female headliner – alongside Skepta, N.E.R.D, Wu-Tang Clan and her one-time collaborator Childish Gambino. With festivals currently under fire for gender disparity, after Pitchfork published a study last year that revealed only a quarter of artists booked for big festivals were female, Rowe is hopeful they will stay true to their pledge of getting gender-equal line-ups by 2022. “The time is now,” she says. “Feminine energy is dominant, whether you throw it on a line-up or not. Everyone can feel it. We don't need [men] to survive or be valid functioning members of society. [Women are] representing themselves in a new grown-up demographic that's probably quite threatening to what we've always known.”
Among the women inspiring her right now, she cites those in Saudi Arabia who have campaigned for their right to drive, the mothers continuing to fight to be reunited with their children after being separated by US immigration authorities, and black female entrepreneurs who, despite racial and gender discrimination, have formed the fastest growing economic force in the US. So when it came to choosing a photographer for the Vogue shoot, Elizabeth Wirija was the perfect fit. The Indonesian-born New Yorker focuses on shooting women of colour because the media is so “whitewashed”. In her words, she contributes to the world “through being an artist and creating my own narrative – work that I would like to see myself in, or relate to”.
Read more: On Our Playlist: Amber Mark
Just as she does with her lyrics, Rowe wears her heart on her sleeve when creating a look. “I like clothes to convey the way I’m feeling,” she says, and so every day starts with the colour that she feels most drawn to. If she’s wearing yellow, she’s “happy and full of joy”; red means she’s “feeling grounded”; purple, she’s accessing higher states of consciousness or, as she puts it, “thinking about the crown chakra”. The pastel-pink Versace gown she wore to the Met Gala signified that she was “thinking about love and sending [loving] energy out [there]”. Her look that night – angelic and multi-layered – was almost the perfect embodiment of her voice.
Read more: Met Gala 2018 Dresses
While, as her debut album suggests, only Rowe is in control of Rowe, she seems to be enjoying the fact she doesn’t know exactly where she is heading. “Who knows what my talents are, who knows if music is the best way to share my gift – I'm just gonna follow it for as long as I can,” she says. After all, she never imagined she’d find herself here – a certified platinum artist, endorsed by Barack Obama (the former president included her in his favourite songs of 2017 list), with five Grammy and three VMA nominations to her name. “I definitely wanted to be in business – I didn't want to be in music,” she adds. “I thought I was going to have a really nice corner office, a lot of respect and a power suit.” Rowe seems to have tackled the hardest thing first – respect she has in abundance. The power suit and corner office would no doubt follow if she so wished – and if her impact on the music world is anything to go by, those holding up glass ceilings should be worried.
