d4vd was such a fan of SZA, he once tried to be the male version of her.
“I took it two steps too far when I was watching SZA and listening to SZA’s music and listening to SOS over and over and over again. I was like, ‘You know what? I want to be SZA at this. I want to be the male version of SZA,'” he tells People. “So I went out, I did a bunch of different sessions with all these big producers, and I was just trying to chase that sound… nothing stuck ’cause nothing felt like me.”
Then, he says he remembered some advice SZA gave him when he joined her on the second leg of her SOS Tour.
“She’s like, ‘Boy, you just got to be you. You just got to be you,'” d4vd recalled. “I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe I do just got to be me.'”
He continued, “So then months and months later, I went to London with three of my friends, and we just took 50 steps back. We ended up making one of the best pieces of music that I’ve put together in a really long time.”
“So I’m excited that it came about, and I’m grateful to SZA for giving me that advice,” he added. “Shout out to SZA for real.”
d4vd’s debut album, Withered, is scheduled to arrive on April 25, following his first-ever appearance at Coachella.
“This album’s the first project where I’m putting my own emotions into it, my own thoughts and my own unadulterated feelings,” he says.
Of Coachella, where he plans to play “a lot of unreleased music,” he shares, “I feel like I have never been in front of an audience like this before…I’m just excited to see the fan feedback and bringing all the new people in.”
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