You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
Lizzo is a Grammy and Emmy-winning singer, rapper, songwriter, and actress.
She's been putting out music since 2013, and her last two albums both went platinum.
Her fifth album, Love in Real Life, comes out this summer.
For this episode, I talked to Lizzo, as well as her longtime collaborator,
Grammy-winning producer Ricky Reed, about the making of one of her new songs, Still Bad.
It wasn't a straightforward process at all.
And coming up, you'll hear just a few of the many,
many demos they made on their way to the final song.
Hey, not me.
I'm Melissa Lizzo, in quotes, Vivian Jefferson, professionally known as Lizzo.
I don't know why I'm so giggly.
Professionally known as Lizzo.
I had started working on this entire album, maybe October 2023.
And I had written a lot of songs that the world will never hear
because it was like house music or like a lot of rap and a lot of like dark songs.
And I was like, I'm not here to write songs.