SZA

📍Maplewood, New Jersey, USA

“Solána Imani Rowe, known as SZA, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in November 1989 and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, a leafy, diverse suburb of Victorian and Tudor-style houses about half an hour from Manhattan. Her mother, Audrey, was an executive at AT&T and her father, Abdul, a producer at CNN. Her father was a devout Muslim and she was raised in the faith, wearing a hijab, though her mother was Christian, and their home was loving, disciplined and full of conversation. She has spoken about feeling like an outsider as a child: a shy girl who was teased, and who sometimes took off her hijab at school to fit in. But she found confidence in gymnastics, which she trained in for thirteen years, becoming captain of the team at Columbia High School and ranking nationally as a teenager. Her father played her jazz, from Billie Holiday to Miles Davis, and she also loved Wu-Tang Clan and Ella Fitzgerald. She was not a singer as a child; she wrote poetry and kept journals, and music came later. After school she studied marine biology at several colleges, and worked at a bar to pay the bills, before she began recording songs with friends in her twenties. In 2013 she signed with Top Dawg Entertainment, and her debut album, Ctrl, released in 2017, and its follow-up SOS made her one of the defining R&B voices of her generation. Her lyrics, honest about insecurity, growing up and finding herself, owe much to the Maplewood girl who kept a journal and felt she didn't quite fit.”

Sources: britannica.com Wikipedia: SZA