Reneé Rapp is a “huge inspiration” to SZA.
The 25-year-old singer covered SZA’s Good Days in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge, backed by a pair of acoustic guitars and a harp player, and SZA, 35, was blown away by the performance.
She shared a clip on Instagram Stories and wrote: “Renee is a HUGE inspiration, energy, voice spirit.”
Speaking about the song, Renee told the BBC: “I mean, I love SZA. I mean, she was one of my favourite artists in high school. And she’s remained one of my favourite artists to this day. I think she’s amazing. She’s also, I mean, she’s an incredible songwriter, but I think because she has so much swag. People don’t realise how good of a singer she is. She’s a fantastic vocalist and is really, really, really articulate. And I don’t cover a lot of songs anymore. So I wanted to cover something that was, like, slightly challenging and also really vocally impressive, and frankly, hard for me to do.”
Renee is currently promoting her second album, Bite Me, and spoke about how she enjoyed making it so much more than her first record.
She explained: “I mean, I feel like everything was incredibly different. I stopped listening to people that don’t make music, because if you don’t make music, then why the hell am I listening to you. And I also think the biggest difference, I think I just got a lot better. I think I have just become a better songwriter. I think I understand how to make pop music now in a way that I didn’t really before. And I was very sure about what this album was and thematically, what it needed.
“So I felt like I was quite like, headstrong in like, what was gonna work and what wasn’t. Because, nobody knows something better than yourself. I think a lot of things were different. I also just, like, had a lot of fun making it, like, I made it with like, three people, mostly, like, it was always like, four of us in the studio all the time, and we got so close, and some of us were already so close. So it was also just like a mess. It was such a mess, like we were just tweaking every day. It was so fun. And I don’t think I enjoyed making the first one as much.”