If you haven’t been listening to SZA, then now is the time to start. This singer killed it at Bonnaroo this year, playing Saturday afternoon in the festival’s “Other Tent”. She gave a delightful performance, including a few surprises. Chance the Rapper joined her on stage while she debuted some new songs. Her style of music is very laid-back electro-soul. This is not typically music for making a crowd dance, in fact, sometimes the crowd can look a little slow. But the energy is real. To counter the headiness of the music, she danced around a lot on stage and encouraged everyone to “get freaky.” She pumped the volume up really loud and performed a great duet with Chance the Rapper for the song, “Child’s Play”. Overall, her new music sounds pretty good. This is an up-and-coming young artist we should definitely all keep our eyes on. “I was raised on a lot of John Coltrane, Satchmo, Miles Davis, Billy Holiday, and Björk with an adult obsession of all things Wu-Tang,” says SZA, who exudes a fascinating mixture of innocence and spunk. ” The one thing I’ve always admired is their ability to paint scenes with their sounds. When I write I usually let the beat saturate my mood and head space; that determines every scene and set design for any song, the rest is all secondary.”
