Lizzo is looking back at the peaks and valleys of her career.
“I wasn’t even really perceiving how famous I had gotten,” the “Truth Hurts” singer, 38, said during her appearance on the Monday, September 7, episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. “I feel like a regular girl in the Twin Cities, walk into the bar, going to get some cheese curds and a beer. I still feel like that girl.”
Lizzo continued, “But the whole world is like, everything I did was news. I had been going full throttle. It was like, clothing line. It was like, TV show, tour, album, actually really doing well. Like, oh my God. I didn’t even know how well the album was doing. I wasn’t paying attention.”
Lizzo shot to fame in 2019 with her hit “Truth Hurts,” which was released two years prior but later went viral thanks to its appearance in the Netflix film Something Great. The single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and increased interest in her third studio album, Cuz I Love You. Lizzo won three Grammy Awards in 2020: Best Pop Solo Album, Best Traditional R&B Performance and Best Progressive R&B Album. (Three years later, Lizzo also won Record Of The Year for her single “About Damn Time,” off her 2022 album, Special.)
At the height of her career, Lizzo expanded her profile to include TV and film, hosting a 2022 reality series called Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls and starring in her own documentary, Love, Lizzo. She also launched her own clothing line, Yitty, that same year.
In August 2023, Lizzo became the subject of controversy when three of her former backup dancers filed a lawsuit against the singer, her production company and her dance captain Shirlene Quigley, accusing them of sexual, religious and racial harassment, disability discrimination, assault, false imprisonment, creating a hostile work environment and weight-shaming.
Lizzo’s former wardrobe assistant, Asha Daniels, also sued the Grammy winner and her touring company over alleged racial and sexual harassment in 2023.
Lizzo has denied all allegations. In December 2025, a judge dismissed the fat-shaming allegations in the suits filed by Lizzo’s former backup dancers. The remaining claims are still pending in court.
A judge ultimately removed Lizzo as an individual defendant in Daniels’ case in 2024. On Tuesday, September 1, the federal court dismissed the remaining claims against her touring company due to a lack of evidence.
Amid the controversy, Lizzo took a break from releasing music until her fifth studio album, BITCH, in June. The project struggled commercially and failed to produce any chart hits.
Lizzo said on Monday that she had always planned to take extra time to work on her latest album, but the hiatus came at a time when “the world stopped f***ing with me.”
“I was like, ‘Whoa, this feels like my life is over,’” she recalled. “And so with the fame thing and the success and the public perception being super positive and being overly loved and people understanding me, I wasn’t looking over my shoulder for a shoe to drop because I really genuinely was moving so purely. I really, which they say you shouldn’t do, just really showed the whole world my heart.”
Lizzo continued, “When everybody started hating me, I kind of didn’t understand. … I had experienced little waves of it, but this time after my [Special Tour] ended, it was, like, legitimate. So I really did feel like my life was over because music had been my life, and I didn’t feel like anyone wanted me to make music anymore.”
Lizzo said she wondered if she should “cease to exist” amid the backlash.
“It was really heavy. It’s really heavy. And I think you have to kind of go to a very, very, very, very low place to be able to kind of float back up to the top,” she added, noting that she ultimately had to find herself as a person again.
“You know, what I came to is knowing who you are and not what you do. I feel like I had been identifying myself as what I do for so long, instead of remembering who I am because that’s my job,” she concluded. “It was extremely freeing because I’m like, ‘Oh, only I know me, only I know who I am and I need to remember that and not allow someone to change that because I can do that too.’”
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