It’s July 2025, and Lizzo’s drinking her first strawberry matcha. She’s a little behind the curve on this one but she’s been way ahead of the consumer-final-boss world we’ve found ourselves in, in every other regard. She had her first Dubai chocolate two whole years ago and has been growing her Labubu collection for over a year. The Houston-raised polymath has long been an early adopter, not just of trends, but of ways of being: a grand-scale pop idealist who made self-love mainstream before every brand and their little sister’s start-up tried to sell it back to us. She’s helped shift the center of culture itself, making room for big girls, band geeks, and anyone else who ever felt they had to shrink to fit in. Last month, she surprise-dropped My Face Hurts From Smiling, a chaotic, cathartic mixtape full of diabolical barbs (“upsettin’ these bitches like Cookinwitkya”), syrupy Houston flow, and a whole load of barely concealed rage. It’s her most unfiltered work yet, and maybe her most brash too.
Here, Lizzo answers our 20 burning questions.
1. What are the mantras you live by? It’s the one that regulates my nervous system: “I trust and respect life. We’re OK.”
2. What’s one thing you cannot live without? My 24 karat gold Dubai chocolate strawberry matcha Labubu.
3. What is your earliest memory? I had a nightmare about Joe Camel [Camel’s smoking mascot]. He made my brother and sister smoke cigarettes in the basement of my house, which was the scariest place in the world to me.
4. Did that put you off cigarettes for life? Yes, that and being a virtuosic flute player.
5. What is your worst nightmare, other than Joe the smoking camel? Not being Black.
6. Favourite song lyrics? “I woke up to bitches who was praying on my downfall, whoever they was praying to ain’t listen to them at all.” [From Lizzo’s Yitty on Yo Tittys]
7. What film have you watched the most? Per capita, I’d say The Lion King. I’ve watched it so much babysitting my little cousin that I know it word for word.
8. What makes you happy? Love.
9. What makes you sad? The world.
10. If you weren’t a musician, what would you be? There are so many things. I’ve done every job. I’ve been a server, I’ve been in retail. If I wasn’t a musician, I would probably be an influencer, like a really, really rage-baity, luxury commentator.
11. What trip have you always wanted to take? Ayahuasca.
What is your worst nightmare, other than Joe the smoking camel? “Not being Black” – Lizzo
12. How has your flute playing influenced your rapping? I grew up in Houston, so rap was just something I was surrounded by. The flute was just something that I picked up in school. But when I started to connect the dots between the two, or realised one could help the other, was with double-tonguing, which is where you play multiple notes really fast. I learned how to translate that into rapping really fast. I used to think that rapping fast meant you were a great rapper, which is not always true. But in my early rap days, I was going a million miles an hour per verse. I was able to push the limit because of the tonguing techniques I learned with the flute.
13. What part of yourself did you need to kill off in order for My Face Hurts from Smiling to be born? There are many parts, but mainly I had to get rid of the part that edited myself all the time. The part that was like, what if this offends somebody? Or, oh my gosh, you can’t say this. I had to just get rid of her. I was like, girl, go sit in the corner, you’re on timeout.
14. Did referring to this project as a “mixtape” instead of an album give you the freedom to be more unedited? I called it a mixtape because I made it in four days on beats. That’s what a mixtape is to me. Traditionally, mixtapes were other people’s songs and rappers would just hop on them. You think about Lil Wayne and his mixtape run, he’s hopping on other people’s songs and rapping on them. I collected a bunch of beats and just rapped my ass off on them. When I make my albums, I tend to build the music from scratch. Wether there’s a sample involved or not, I don’t just take beat packs from my albums; I sit in the studio with musicians and producers and I build from scratch, and it takes me a long time. The mixtape of it all was me being like, I’m about to hop on this beat, and just rap. So yeah – that and the fact that there are no physical copies, and the fact that it’s not an official release.
15. Who’s an underrated Houston rapper who deserves more shine? I have two answers. Z-ro influenced me so much. I Love You Bitch was an interpolation of I Hate You Bitch. The Mo City Don freestyle is so iconic, like that’s our First Day Out, Dreams and Nightmares of Houston. You put that on in the club, everybody’s singing it. So I do want to give him his flowers as an influence because when he was popping off a lot of the other guys in that crew became a little bit more mainstream and he didn’t. So I would say Z-ro, but then also Beyoncé. She been rapping. We just like to put singer on her because she’s an incredible singer and, you know, branded herself and labelled herself as R&B and pop. But she be rapping down. Give her her ones.
16. Do you feel like you’ve had to smile through things you wanted to scream about? Yes. There’s a certain amount of grace and patience that you have to have as a famous person because a lot of people like to make shit up about you, push your buttons and bait you to get your attention. Not taking the bait has been one of the greatest lessons of patience in my life. I used to see things and respond to them, or make a video clapping back or whatever. But I don’t need to do that, because I know why people are doing it; they’re trying to get my attention.
What’s one thing you cannot live without? “My 24 karat gold Dubai chocolate strawberry matcha Labubu” – Lizzo
17. Can anything in life prepare you for fame – say, high school? If someone started a rumour about you in high school, is that in any way comparable to what it’s like to experience fame? I don’t think anything prepares you for fame, but high school does prepare you for the industry. Most industries, especially creative arts industries, are like high school all over again. Like, I was the band nerd that was funny so people fucked with me. Now I’m that girl in the music industry, the funny band nerd. So people like me, they acknowledge my talent, but I’m not one of the cool kids. But nothing prepares you for fame itself, because fame happens to you. It’s one of those things where you don’t change, but everyone around you does. You have to ask yourself: do you change with it or do you remain the same? And you can tell the difference between people who have chosen to change and people who’ve chosen to stay the same. It’s all a very unique experience, which is why, if you see other famous people out and about, we’ll give each other a hug. It can be such a beautiful thing, like we’re a part of this family.
18. What’s something about fame that no one ever talks about? Just how regular famous people are. People think that famous people are as weird as the tabloids or as strange as the conspiracies. But once I started going into certain spaces, I was like, oh, this shit is like the prom or a homecoming dance or like the club. These aren’t superhumans, they just have a certain amount of eyeballs on them that you don’t have, or they have access to certain things that you don’t have access to, but if you strip all of that away, they’re just fucking human beings. They shit on the toilet, they make mistakes, they don’t always look put together, they be doing regular shit. They get insecure too. They get social anxiety too. Famous people, they’re just like us.
Can anything in life prepare you for fame – say, high school? If someone started a rumour about you in high school, is that in any way comparable to what it’s like to experience fame? “I don’t think anything prepares you for fame, but high school does prepare you for the industry. Most industries, especially creative arts industries, are like high school all over again” – Lizzo
19. This mixtape sounds like happiness filtered through anger. Do you see it as more of a performance of happiness or a reclamation of it? I called it My Face Hurts From Smiling because I was in a studio and all my friends were in there and they were doing the gang vocals and stuff on Crashout, and I was just so happy. I said, “My face hurts from smiling”, because my cheeks were literally cramping. And for me, that was such a special moment because I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. I haven’t felt that way when I think about the world, when I think about America, when I think about my life, when I think about my relationships, when I think about my career, when I think about making music in the studio, in my skin, in my body. And I thought that that was such a poignant way of describing how everybody feels. You know, they say to smile to keep from crying. Like, there’s a lot of joy and pain in the world right now, and there’s so much pain, people are seeking joy at an all-time high. I’m seeking joy too, and this was me joining the conversation of where we are in the world.
20. Did this mixtape feel like a way back to yourself? I would say yes. I found my voice again. My real voice; no filters, no apologies. I got very apologetic at a certain point in my life. And for what? I didn’t do nothing wrong. So why am I always so apologetic? Why do I always feel so shitty? Like, no, I am me. Finding myself again, embracing my voice and celebrating my voice is what this project was all about.
My Face Hurts From Smiling by Lizzo is out now.
