Lizzo on the Year "Truth Hurts" Flopped: "I was like, oh, I quit music"
In the episode of Armchair Expert published last Monday, September 7, Lizzo told Dax Shepard about the songs she believed in before anyone else did. The first was one she called "Where the Hell My Phone", probably her 2016 single "Phone", a freestyled song about losing your phone and your friends at a club. "I thought Where the Hell My Phone was gonna change my life," she said. Her verdict on how that went: "No, nothing happened to this day with that song."
The second was "Truth Hurts". It came out on September 19, 2017, a year to the day after "Phone", and it did not chart. That one did more than disappoint her. She has told versions of this story before, and this one does not soften it.
What the flop years sound like
Hold that quote up against the song. "Truth Hurts" is a breakup record, and its sharpest turn is a kiss-off to a partner who was meant to be on her side: "You're 'posed to hold me down / But you're holding me back / And that's the sound of me not calling you back." It is a breakup song, and nothing in it is about the music business. But play it now, knowing she felt "a lot of people went dark on me who was supposed to support me at that time", and the lyric reads like a preview of the year and a half that followed.
Those months were not glamorous. A New York Times profile from September 18, 2018, a full year after the single, finds her backstage at MoMA PS1 Warm Up four hours before showtime, "stressing about whether anyone in the crowd would know the lyrics to her songs." Her line that day: "I have to fake it until I make it." The crowd, the paper reported, sang along with every word. Her album still did not have a name.
This is the part of the Armchair Expert conversation that matters most for how you hear her records. After "I quit music", she was talked out of it, and she made a choice: "And then they were like, hey, don't do that. And I was like, all right, I'm just gonna make music and just talk to my fans and not worry about nobody else." That decision is on tape, if you know which tape to play.
The week the room turned
What happened next reads like a story someone made up. By mid-April 2019, TikTok had found the song's DNA-test line, and BuzzFeed News reported on April 15 that the meme had "taken over the app." Four days later, on April 19, two things arrived on the same day: Lizzo's album Cuz I Love You, and a Netflix romantic comedy called Someone Great. The song everybody was about to hum was not on the album.
Someone Great stars Gina Rodriguez as Jenny, a New York music journalist who lands her dream job at Rolling Stone in San Francisco and then gets dumped by her boyfriend of nine years. Her best friends (Brittany Snow and DeWanda Wise) pull her into one last adventure together before she moves. Its trailer gave "Truth Hurts" about 15 seconds. Billboard's Jason Lipshutz, writing that July, described them as Rodriguez and her pals "singing, dancing and generally mining pure joy" from the song, and called those seconds "the moment where something was clearly unlocked."
The rest you probably know, so here it is quickly. The deluxe edition of the album, out May 3, added "Truth Hurts" as a bonus track. The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 50 in May, reached No. 1 in September and spent seven weeks there, the longest run at the top for a solo song by a female rapper, which earned her a Guinness World Record. It won the Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance. "Good as Hell", a 2016 single, woke up the same year and climbed to No. 3. Two late bloomers in one year, and both were songs she told Shepard she had believed in.
Hear the flop era first
Here is the claim fans of the big singles will argue with. The Lizzo to hear first is Cuz I Love You in its original form: 11 songs, 33 minutes, no "Truth Hurts". At a preview event in January 2019 she said she had "been working on the album for three years", which puts its making squarely in the years before "Good as Hell" or "Truth Hurts" found an audience. It covers a lot of ground in 33 minutes: "Juice" was the lead single, "Like a Girl" has been called an "empowering dance track", "Tempo" brings in Missy Elliott, and the closer, "Lingerie", slows into neo-soul.
The Guardian's Alexis Petridis heard it differently in 2019, writing that the album "keeps its foot pressed down hard on the accelerator for half an hour in an attempt to ram-raid the charts." He is right about the speed. Knowing what she told Shepard, though, we hear that urgency as someone who has stopped waiting for permission.
Then play the three deluxe bonus tracks in order: "Boys", "Truth Hurts", "Water Me". The hit turns up at track 13, a late arrival, which is exactly what it was.
After that, put on Special, the 2022 follow-up, as the after-picture. This is the record of someone who knows the whole room is listening: it is led by "About Damn Time", which went to No. 1 and won Record of the Year, and Max Martin helped reshape the title track's hook. It is a good pop album that tells you less about her than the one before it.
And the rewatch is Someone Great. Go back to it as what it is, a film about losing a nine-year relationship and leaning on your friends for one last adventure, and then notice which song its trailer reached for. The movie found a song that had been good for a year and a half and handed it to people who were ready for it.
Lizzo's own verdict, from the same conversation, is the healthiest line in it: "one thing about me, I don't care if I flop or have the biggest song in the world." Her reason: "I'm a songwriter and a performer, so I'm always gonna be okay." Start with the record she made when the flop still looked like the likelier outcome.
