Being a perfectionist can be complicated. On one hand, it’s great for an artist to be meticulous about details or making sure that a take comes out just right. However, it can also freeze someone from ever releasing anything.
They could have an abundance of great records that they can’t stop tinkering with. Leave them unsupervised, and they’ll edit and scrap songs forever. This is the case for SZA, who notably spent five years in between her debut album Ctrl and her follow-up, SOS.
TDE released ‘Ctrl’ After taking SZA’s recordings from her
Apparently, this perfectionism got so bad during the creation of her debut that her label essentially kicked her out of the studio. During a 2017 conversation with The Guardian, she recalled the many delays in making Ctrl. Her anxiety reached a point of inactivity.
Then, SZA would chaotically start scrapping songs entirely. “I freestyle everything, all the way down. And I listen back and think, ‘What’s s***ty?’” the “Snooze” crooner explained. “And if something’s too s***ty and I can’t put my finger on it, and I think, ‘Wow, this sucks to me,’ then I get way frustrated, and usually scrap the song.”
Eventually, it reached a point where her label, TDE, wouldn’t allow her to keep self-sabotaging. They reckoned they had enough great songs to satiate her fanbase. Given the critical and audience reception, they were right.
SZA Said She Might’ve Scrapped All of ‘Ctrl’ if She Had Another Month
“They just took my hard drive from me. That was all,” the artist born Solana Rowe said. “I just kept f***ing everything up— I just kept moving s*** around. I was choosing from 150, 200 songs, so I’m just like, who knows what’s good anymore?”
Ultimately, SZA had no idea where any of her work went. She showed up to the studio as usual one day, and everything was gone. But in a way, someone from TDE taking the hard drive away from her was a blessing in disguise.
If it were up to her, we likely would’ve heard an entirely different album. “Any longer and I probably wouldn’t … I’m also driving myself f**king crazy, so I don’t know. Give me another month, and it would have been something completely different,” she admitted.
In a hilarious bit of irony, SZA believed that her follow-up to Ctrl was going to be done in six months. She credited a lot of that belief to an ease in anxiety, causing her creativity to flow a lot more smoothly. However, we wouldn’t get that second album SOS until the tail end of December 2022.
The post SZA’s Record Label Forced the Release of Her Iconic Debut Album Because She ‘Kept F***ing Everything Up’ appeared first on VICE.
