

At the time, though, it felt more like a plunge into despair. She looks back on that period now as a key turning point in her quest for artistic truth. “It got lonely sometimes.”īy the spring of 2020, Zora had dropped out of Berklee. “When I initially came out and started transitioning, I just wanted to find friends and a chosen family,” she says. “It was like, you don’t have to do what’s trendy or what’s cool.”Īround the same time, she was coming to understand herself as a trans woman looking for her place in the world. “ To Pimp a Butterfly specifically inspired me to make anything that felt close to my heart,” she says. Searching for something realer, she listened closely to Sophie’s boundary-pushing electronic production and Kendrick Lamar’s defiantly individualistic rap.

Everyone was like, ‘She’s amazing!’ But I was like, ‘I don’t even know what I wrote about.” “I could not connect with it at all, but I could sing it so well. “All of my music was cookie-cutter love-song, straight-up R&B – very much, like, ‘Baby come back to me, I love you,’” she says. Far from home, she struggled with insecurity about the path she was on.
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“But I also didn’t know how to make my own music yet.”Īfter high school, she moved across the country to study the music business at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. I literally want to be like them,’” she says.

Zora herself was drawn to iconic pop and R&B voices like Britney Spears, Lauryn Hill, Ariana Grande, and Janet Jackson - artists whose music sparked something within her. Growing up in L.A., Zora was a shy kid surrounded by a family full of musical gifts: a grandmother who taught her to play piano, a dad who moved crowds as a hip-hop DJ, a cousin who plays in a progressive metal band. Flashback: Tina Turner Covers Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson on Debut Solo Album
